Meowllo! It started snowing here! It’s officially winter! How was your Halloween? This is our 50th devlog, and we’re gonna spend it talking about bugs!
Yay!
Cries into desk
🐛 TOO MANY BUGS
Since we last chatted, we’ve fixed 67 bugs and there are currently 19 fixes waiting to be tested and confirmed. That’s…a lot of bugs. Some of them were small, like Nobu Jr. saying “Nobu Jr.” instead of barn…
Some were major, like ways you can lock yourself in the game or NPCs not spawning at all.
Or spawning twice.
We’ve been super buried in bugs, but we’ve got our fingers and toes crossed we can get the game stable enough to move into some light testing outside of QA.
Speaking of QA, QA are the real angels here.
Snacko has a lot of content to test, and one of the most annoying to debug and fix (in my personal opinion) are NPC schedule issues.
Why aren’t they walking? Wait, where did they go? Huh?? It’s terrible. I just want Riku to show up for work! Stop being lazy!!
🎨 NEW COLORS
We had some dyes that have been in the game since the beginning. We’ve always wanted to come back and make tweaks or add any shades…and we finally did!
Here’s just some of them, modelled by the wonderful Scarecrow.
✨ SMALL TOUCHES
Sometimes, to lift my spirits from the depths of bug hell. For example, each house now has a little placard or interactable area that has the resident’s name. Depending on their personality, they might’ve included other information there.
Some other things also include signs in the world. This one was vandalized by a certain stinky small boy.
We also added quest markers, so it’s harder to get lost. I hope? It shows up as a lil exclamation mark. It’s even red, to show its aggression.
And…that’s about it for this month! Thank you for reading through a bug report. Your support and giggles of our bugs on Twitter has been keeping me sane 🐾
Devlog #49 - Bugs, bugs, bugs...
Oh me oh my, it has come the time for us to be experience the beauties of QA.
Specifically, we’ve been hard at work wrapping up the Kickstarter backer beta build. For the past…I don’t even know how many weeks to be honest, we’ve been solving bugs, fixing soft locks, and tweaking things so it felt like a real game.
You know, sometimes, I still get shocked Snacko is a real game.
Anyways.
🌱 A New Beginning
Quite literally. The first part of the game was one of the first parts we worked on (duh), so I’ve always felt a bit…sussed by it. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t like how it threw you into an endless journey of dialogue for the first 15 minutes.
Now, you start off with a relatively short bit of text and straight into the tutorial where you can walk around and get a feel for the gameplay. Although we kept almost 90% of the content originally made for the intro, I’ve shuffled things around a bit and edited some dialogue to set up the rest of the game (in my humble opinion) better.
As I go through the rest of the game’s text to get ready for localization, I’ve been re-re-re-checking to make sure all of the lore and story flows together properly.
‘Cause, you know, I can’t keep my own lore straight.
📖 World Building
Speaking of lore, I’ve also made some small cosmetic changes and swaps to parts of the story. Snacko’s main story has undergone a couple of small changes while keeping pretty close to Mandy’s original plot outline for the game.
These are kind of small things, but they’re really important to me. I hope these small changes and improvements to the story makes the overall experience feel more polished!
💀 Bug Hell
Well, OK, now to the actual bulk of what we’ve been up to. Some of these aren’t even “bugs”, more like features that were never truly finished. One of the confusing bits of the minimap has been the player’s cursor’s direction being ambiguous. Well, now there’s an arrow! So I hope you won’t get lost!!
Real bugs aside, there’s small things from the bookshelf UI not being contained to the window properly, causing it to spill out the sides and become unreadable/unusable if your monitor or window wasn’t a perfect 16:9…
…to bigger bugs like…Nobu falling off the map continuously, banished forever to the Shadow Realm.
All in all, we probably squashed a little over 40 bugs of varying sizes and…intensity. Rest assured, Nobu is now safely in his house instead of falling until the end of time. Sometimes, to make sure we can easily debug issues, we end up with screenshots like this:
The debug default cobblestone texture wall from the depths of game development hell. Lovely.
Looking back, though, the game is in a much better spot. I’m pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished since August! I think I’m starting to get less anxious about Snacko as a real video game that real people (wow) are going to play!
This is how I feel…
Well, that’s all for this month! Hopefully, we can squish the last of the ugly bugs in the upcoming weeks and run the beta. Ahh, I’m so nervous. Imagine that, people actually playing the video game.
Thanks for reading until the very end! 💌
Devlog #48 - Housing for All
Meowllo everyone! We’re a little late on this month’s devlog due to a certain little stinker having a health scare. Turns out he’s perfectly healthy, just needs to grow more… But now that all the vet appointments are over, I’m free to write my rambling devlogs! Yay!(?)
🏠 Playing Games on the Job
I touched on this topic vaguely in the past before, but I love using the Sims as a tool to help me play around with ideas for houses in Snacko. While the scale, materials, and colors don’t end up 1:1, it’s a good starting point that’s faster to iterate on than traditional concept art.
Plus, I get to play the Sims while working…
I wanted the houses to match the personality of their inhabitant, and this bold house with big windows and different style from the regular wooden cabins fits Date’s personality well.
I hope you enjoy getting to know Date and his eccentricities!
All in all, this month, we added 3 new houses for the additional NPCs that will be in the Kickstarter backer build. Everyone else already had houses, but Date, Hanna, and Riku were homeless…until now.
Now, they can enjoy paying property tax like everyone else (there is no property tax).
A little new touch I added to the houses to give them some character is interactable placards. View them to remind yourself of their opening hours, or just what the resident has scribbled on them.
I tried phrasing every one slightly differently to match their personality.
🏃 Progression Design
The bulk of last month’s work was on progression design. Remember how we put in all the assets and cutscenes for the main story? That’s cool and all, but…the game needed more meat on its bones.
The way story beats were triggered meant you could pretty much speed run a lot of it. It just felt a little empty and sad. To help pace the game better, we’ve changed from hard-triggers (X happens on day 5, Y happens on day 8), it’s now a cascading series of events and triggers that can cause something else to happen and unlock.
That way, people who want to speedrun the content can, and for those of us who like to chill a little and play at our own pace, you’re not getting cutscenes thrown at you randomly.
We’ve also added a bunch of different changes and quests to how you can obtain rewards like crafting recipes or items… (that I won’t get into but I spent a lot of brain power on)
But our hope is with these new quests and cutscenes, it’ll make your settlement into Snacko life a lot easier and filled with dopamine hits!
And…that’s the bulk of August! There’s somehow more work popping up the more work we do, because of things like the progression where we feel like an aspect of the game still needs some polish. But this is a good sign, right? That means there’s enough of a game there to criticize…right??
Ahh, games are hard. I’m going back to work.
See you next month, and thank you for reading until the end! 🐾
Devlog #47 - Chatterbox
Hello! I have emerged from the other side of July a new person, battered by the onslaught of NPC implementation that I started last month.
I don’t remember if I mentioned we’re working on our first pass for the Kickstarter backer beta yet, but if I didn’t. Yeah.
So, this month, we’re nearing the end of implementing some of the connective tissue to bind some Snacko features together.
🐐 Why does everyone talk so much?
Oh right, I wrote the text, it’s my fault.
Anyways, the bulk of this month for me was continuing to put in NPCs. This entails a couple of things…
Sprites: Stefan did all the animations, but not all of them have been put in as Flipbooks (Unreal’s system for sprite animation)
Portraits: I had the PNGs, but they were just floating around in my PC
Schedules: the bane of my existence, responsible for my deteriorating husk of a person I became. There was more detail on this last month, but essentially, it’s just a lot of careful busywork that needed just enough brain power to wear you down
Dialogue: each NPC has a “dialogue resolver” that tries to determine what dialogue asset to use. For example, a shopkeeper will have a “come back later” set of dialogue when you bother them during store hours, or a specific set of lines about food when they’re eating. It’s essentially just a bunch of true or false checks.
Alongside the resolver are the actual dialogue assets (spaghetti monster). Within these, there are sometimes trees to determine which set of text to use depending on the time of day for hello’s, or the relationship level. As you befriend them, they’ll let you in on a bit more of what makes them tick. I hope you’ll spend some time getting to know everyone and their quirks!
…and that’s the bulk of what I’ve been doing! You can really watch me melt into my skin through my source control commit descriptions:
📬 Return of the Mailbox
Ever since we remade the player house, the mailbox was replaced with a shell of its former self. It no longer had a little flag animation when you stepped outside and had new mail, it no longer had a little floating notification for your new letters…
Truly tragic.
But despair no more! I put it back in.
Also, recursive hooked up the rest of the letter system for inviting NPCs. In the past, we had the UI and framework, but only Mack ever replied. No matter what. You cannot escape Mack.
(Un?)Luckily for you, that system is now in, so you can escape from Mack. For the duration of the beta, we’ll be just giving you the house you need to invite NPCs for free, but in the final game, blueprints for building different kinds of houses and shops are unlocked as you progress for that sweet ✨dopamine✨.
🪑Don’t Be A Birch About It!
Also to give some more meat to the build, I added in a select few pieces of buildables from a set you can craft after razing the Grassy Plains of its natural foliage. Here’s a sneak peak at some of the pieces:
The vibe I was going for with the Birch set is a mix between some mid-century modern and Scandinavian vibes. All the white parts are dye-able, like the seat cushion and lamp shade. You can really change up the feel of the pieces by making them bright colors!
And…that’s all for this month! Thank you for reading until the end 🌼 We’ll see you next month!
Devlog #46 - A Solid Plan
Meowllo everyone! It’s already the end of June, which means the year is half over, which means I’m in despair.
That aside, a couple weeks ago, we announced through Wholesome Direct that we’re coming to PS4 + PS5! Ameowzing! Huey is handling a lot of the porting just like the Switch version, so we’re excited to try their implementation of the special PS5 controller haptic effects.
We’ve been mostly focused on other things, though…so let’s run through those!
📑 RIGHT ON SCHEDULE
A long…long…..time ago, we mentioned our rehaul of the NPC schedule system. Up until now, we haven’t had a chance to implement any NPCs outside of making sure the system works. Now that the bare bones storyline is playable, I’ve been working on implementing getting a select few NPCs alive and running.
We’re aiming to complete a build for Kickstarter backers and old Patreon supporters who were grandfathered into the beta test. Having just an empty island with a bunch of story isn’t what we want people to experience, so the past month and the foreseeable future will be spent polishing that experience.
It’s kind of exciting that a few months ago, we were still trying to get the game to even go through the tutorial properly. Now we’re tying everything together and implementing content for it to be playable. It’s a nice feeling, but also kind of scary.
Above is what the overview of a schedule looks like. Depending on the NPC, they might have more than one. For example, Nobu has a different schedule when it’s raining, because he doesn’t have to water his crops. Shopkeepers might have a different routine on days their store is closed.
Inside each action contains the actual logic. This might be things like setting flags for dialogue, or adding in locations for where to walk next.
The actual system is quite simple and intuitive to use (thanks recursive), but it’s still a bit time consuming and dry…
🎨 NEW ART
So, I’ve been dispersing some of my NPC work with art work! Do you remember Lan?
Her happy portrait debuted when we launched our Kickstarter in 2020 (oh no time flies). Now, she’s got the full gamut of emotions!
In the Switch trailer, there was also a portrait of Rejka looking bashful. I’ve revisited that portrait and improved it, since it’s always bothered me a bit. Now our beautiful eyelash boy gets the beautiful portrait he deserves.
Asides from some portraits I don’t want to show you just yet 🤫, I’ve also done some new asset work. There’s a lot of placeable furniture for one person to work through, so I’m going for a couple at a time to break it up.
What I’m trying to accomplish with the furniture sets in Snacko is having each set correlate loosely to a style. That way, if you’re not into the default rustic vibes the softwood set provides, there’s other things for you to get excited about.
Anyways, that’s all we have for June. Thank you for reading all the way until the end! We’ll see you next month 👋
Snacko coming to PS4 + PS5!
If you missed our new trailer debut during 2022’s Wholesome Direct…
We’re also coming to Playstation 4 and 5!
In addition to the Nintendo Switch and PC releases, we’ve been working quietly in the background to bring Snacko to PS4 and PS5.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us, read our devlogs, shared our Tweets, wishlisted us, and followed our journey so far.
This is all new to us…from juggling dev and other game-related work, to figuring out how to navigate the seas of tying up the loose ends of a big chunky game.
There’s been a lot of challenges so far, and probably more ahead (sorry QA…sorry programmers……), but we’ll get through them!
We’re getting to the end, and we can’t wait to see Snacko released into the world!
Devlog #45 - The Camera Has Legs!!!
Meowllo everyone! How are you? You may have noticed this devlog is a bit late. We were visiting family and have just returned. I thought about writing the devlog while I was away since I did bring my laptop, but recording videos and GIFs on a smaller screen is a bit sus.
So anyways, I figured it’d be worth the wait for me to get back on my work computer to do this.
Before we begin, here’s a reminder that the Wholesome Direct will be tomorrow!
You should show up. Because I’m telling you to (there’s gonna be Snacko news).
🎬 …AND ACTION!
Miguel has been helping us implement all the NPC friendship events! There’s a lot…26 NPCs, x3 because there’s 3 friendship events per NPC…
Sometimes, when I complain about the amount of stuff the game needs, I remember that I made it this way, so I shouldn’t complain.
Anyways. Can you imagine testing these all either manually by spam gifting poor Frits to raise his friendship level? Or typing in the console command? Imagine typing.
So, we added a little panel with all the buttons that will run the console command for you. Which means I did have to at least type it once, unfortunately.
It’ll be good in the near future where we’ll have to test everything, though.
📝 LEARNING THE ROPES
Outside of friendship events, we’ve also been implementing other tutorial or onboarding quests and cutscenes. There’s a couple outside of the main storyline that will teach you the basics of farm life, like ranching, fishing, and more!
If you’re already a farming pro, you can skip most of these lectures, but you’ll make Nobu Jr. sad. So really, who wins?
📸 THE CAMERA HAS LEGS!
Well, not really. The camera floats. So maybe wings? But it’s a stable camera, don’t worry.
We added camera controls to build mode!
Amongst a bunch of other improvements. Recursive has been turbo-working to improve and streamline the building process. We started the redesign a few months ago, but prioritized wrapping up the main storyline so it fell to the wayside. It looked something like this:
If you’ve been subscribed to our Ko-fi or Patreon, you probably remember us talking about something like this a few months ago in more detail. But the gist of it is combining the old place and edit mode into one, and “auto-triggering” the states depending on the status of your cursor (if you’re holding something, etc.)
It’s easier to see, so I’ve recorded a video:
If you’re unable to watch, here’s a quick rundown:
Toggle the inventory tray whenever to easily swap what you’re holding
When your cursor is empty, you can freely select already placed objects to put them away, dye them, or move them. Fences will reconnect!
You can now pan, rotate, and zoom the camera freely
Amazing! Hopefully, this will make decorating a lot more fun and easy with the added freedom. This just means a lot more extra bugs…can’t wait……..
With that, that wraps up what we’ve been up to in May. The end of the build mode marks the end of the last major system that needed big changes, which is a pretty big milestone in itself.
We’ll keep you updated as we slog through the mountain of loose ends and terrifyingly random bugs in the near future. You’ll be updated through my tears.
Thank you for reading! We’ll see you next month 🌼
Devlog #44 - Fur-niture
Meowllo everyone! Is the weather changing for you yet? It’s still kind of cold where we are, so it feels like spring hasn’t sprung. Sad.
Anyways, this month, we have quite a lot of fixes, changes, and assets done. It was great! Let’s go over the furniture first…
📂 Orderly Categories
We used to have our stuff simply labelled “Exterior” and “Interior”. You can see how that becomes a nightmare really, really fast. A table that can be placed outdoors and indoors…which folder does it go in? I dunno.
So, the first task of the month was to have our folders and data follow the new categories we’ve assigned the buildables: in sets.
Softwood, Hardwood, Birch, and so on. My aim with this is to assign each set a different style. That way, when you unlock new furniture crafting sets by exploring new areas, you can also diversify your style. This also helps me organize the different kinds of items in each set. That way, you don’t get excited about unlocking a new kind of lumber, just to realize you can only craft 5 different kinds of chairs.
The Softwood set needed a couple of UI icons and assets that were missing, so I made those up first to call this first set done.
The little stuffed toys and miscellaneous clutter like an open book and ink bottle topped off the set. I was able to use my super powerful pixel texturing skills (see: more polygons) and fit the entire set into one 64x64 pixel texture sheet. I’m pretty proud of that.
This kind of setup also makes it easy for us to add to existing sets or make new furniture sets in the future when we have time to put in more content. Win-win!
📐 Building In-Between
Another thing we changed about building is the way that surface building areas worked. The old system had two issues:
It was done manually. Well, the new one is also done manually, but hear me out. In the past, each building area was done by making a box in the modelling program, modelling the collision of the border, and so on. It was a bit of a pain to do, and it also made the process slow.
There were borders. To prevent you from putting something completely off a surface, we made borders in the old system. Not only did this add time to making the areas, it also meant that something like counters that could perfectly snap together wouldn’t allow you to put objects on the seams of them.
But now…ta-da!
You can put them wherever, as long as the collision exists. That also means you can technically stack tables on tables, so I had to add a ceiling collision to prevent you from yeeting yourself outside of your home and into the void. Games are hard.
But, our suffering is not in vain :D
Now you can do cool things like placing two tables close together and putting something on them, like this:
We also double checked to make sure all the food items that exist can now be placed in build mode. You can decorate your home with all the dishes you make! They’ll never spoil. You know, magic.
📦 Overflow Storage
Do you see something beside the house there? The little crate is a placeholder asset, but we added overflow storage. It needs a bit of UI work, but essentially, if you get anything on your adventure and your rucksack is out of space, it’ll get sent to your overflow storage at home.
You can get items out of it, but you can’t place anything into it. No more worries about carrying too much on your trips!
🚗 Cars can Jump
In Snacko, at least.
We added jumping when you’re in your kart. We’ve had issues of being annoyed during testing having to get in and out of the kart. So, the solution is to allow the car to jump (obviously).
I’m not sure what the ramifications of making this decision will be, like speeding headfirst off the side of your farm, but we can all cross that bridge when we get there as a community. Asides from all that, we’ve also fixed a bunch of small bugs like, “you can get stuck in the Desert Canyon if you jump off this one cliff and your feetsies touch the side”. Asides from that, this is all we have for you for April!
If you have seasonal allergies, we hope you’re hanging in there…
Thank you for all your support, and see you next month 👋
Devlog #43 - Tree 🌲 (🌳)
Meowllo everyone! Spring is supposed to be here, but it’s still kind of cold. Sad.
This month, we had a week where we weren’t able to work on anything because we moved! We’re currently in a temporary place before we move to our final destination in a couple of weeks. It was uh, a lot. Anyways, we were still able to do some work and hit our first big milestone!
📖 END OF A CHAPTER
We finished the main story! Now the cutscenes and text is all complete, along with the camera movements. Ken was able to finish all of it by the end of March, and it was a huge lifesaver. The cutscenes require a lot of setting up. Every time an NPC emotes something, walks somewhere, triggers a quest, or just says something, it has to be implemented.
With Ken’s work, we were able to quickly wrap up the loose ends and tie it all together. But…this is also Ken’s last month with us! Let’s all thank Ken for all the ameowzing work he’s done for Snacko 👏 There’s still bugs and little quirks to work out, but the story is officially playable from beginning to end! Now, we just have to finish all of the content. Laughs nervously.
🌳 TREE
Speaking of content, the Frozen Tundra and Mushroom Forest were always a bit…naked. I had to put in the foliage for those areas.
The Mushroom Forest took the longest, because it just needed a lot of stuff to make it look like a proper forest. Oh, but not too much stuff. If I put in too much stuff the Switch will just yell at me. The Frozen Tundra was a little harder. If I put too much stuff, it looked off. Like the desert, part of the vibe was this feeling of isolation and extreme temperature environment. So it couldn’t be too luscious. Also, the color spots just kinda ruined the tundra views. I ended up placing mostly smaller bushes and rocks to give it that feel, and limited the trees to small clumps instead of being everywhere.
🎮 EVERYTHING ELSE
Asides from all that, there were a lot of fixes and things missing. Most of it were mistakes in cutscenes or dialogue. A whole lot of “oh no Mikan is walking away from me why is she leaving come back” in the middle of a cutscene. Some other things include actually adding water levels to the watering can. Up until this week, you had infinite water in your watering can.
Now, you can either interact with a water source like a well on your farm to refill it or… Jump into water! Recursive calls this the “Mario Sunshine” update. There’s no pretty indicator bar yet, just a generic progress bar to show your water levels. But don’t worry about it, I’ll fix that. Soon. That’s pretty much it! The rest of it is mostly all of the NPC dialogue finished (finally) and a lot of other stuff I can’t show you because it’d be spoilers.
Thank you for reading! We hope you’re having a great week, and we’ll see you next month 😺
Devlog #42 - Where am I?
Meowllo everyone! We’re a little late for February’s devlog because…writing…is hard.
If you follow us on Twitter or joined our Discord, you know I’ve spent the past couple of weeks writing dialogue. I’m still working on that (8 left~) so I’ve been having trouble finding the time and writing brain cells to write the devlog.
OK, less complaining, more devlog!
📬 Dialogue
OK, I’m gonna talk about this first, because I’m drowning in text. There’s just a lot of talking. I mean, that’s technically my fault, because I could make the NPCs talk less, but then I’ll be sad.
Each NPC has hello’s when you talk to them for the first time every day, and those can change depending on the time of day or your relationship level.
Different text may also come up if they have a flag set (like working, or eating) or if you’re friends with them. In a vacuum, that’s not a huge issue. But, multiply that by 28 NPCs…and well, I’ve been suffering just a little bit.
📐Cartography
Beyond my writer’s tears, we’ve also been working on implementing the maps so you know where you are and where you’re going. Here’s just some of the maps!
You can choose to toggle the mini-map on your HUD on or off and just pull out your big map when you’re lost…or have it on all the time, because you’re lost all the time (me).
There’s still some details to iron out, like NPC icons being big, but hey - it works!
So, um, yeah. Outside of that, and a lot of back-end stuff like making sure features work properly, UI tweaks, being able to close menus (that’s a nice feature, wouldn’t you say?), that’s all we have for this month.
Sorry, There’s not a lot of pretty pictures. There’s only so many Google Docs I can post with Consolas text before I start getting whacked for spoiling the whole game.
Thank you for all the support, we really appreciate it!
Back to writing… Pulls out a tissue box for my tears
