Devlog #25 - Pleased to Meowt You
Fall is officially here! Although it sure doesn’t feel like it, as we’re still clocking in temperatures at about 26C. But that’s OK! This month, we started doing something egg-citing: tying everything together.
Before we start, Nobu Jr. kicks off his new YouTube career going through this exact devlog…give it a peek!
🎀 Knot Your Average Problem
What does tying everything together mean? So far, Snacko has a staggering amount of stuff. Furniture you can place, objects you can dye, NPCs you can talk to, seeds you can plant…all of it is working, but they all work in sort of a sandbox type way.
This is our debug menu - you can use this to give yourself items, add cows to your barn, or fast-forward your farm tiles to test crop growing. Up until now, we’ve tested and played all of these parts and pieces of Snacko like this.
We’re now hitting that point where we need to start trying to knead everything together to see how it all fits into one another and test the overall game feel instead of just tinkering with it in isolated instances. This proves to be very…time consuming. The simple act of giving you the ability to harvest a turnip is quite long…
To avoid spoiling too much dialogue or story, we’re going to keep all of this stuff hush-hush! So…you won’t be seeing too much in regards to cutscenes and dialogue.
We showed some of the tutorials last month, with some screenshots of the opening cutscene including Nobu’s big lecture on placing buildables and planting crops. This month, we expanded on that by adding some quests that would reward players after teaching them something about the game.
If you’ve seen our old quest board screenshots before you’ll notice the quest card is slightly different! It has been slightly modified to fit in with the rest of the dialogue box changes - more contrast, bigger text, and inline images. Fancy!
🏡 Home Sweet Home
We had to get some interiors of shops and houses put in. Each interior would be dependent on the type and style of building it is, not by the inhabitant. Here’s a look at the first floor of the Suburban Grocer!
We also realized that for Nobu Jr. to come to the island and sell ranching goods and livestock, Nobu’s house will have to expand to accommodate the little furball. We’ve set up an event to trigger the house exterior and interior to change when Junior is set to move in. He even gets his special (extra short) counter for you to shop from!
The upstairs also features Junior’s favorite spot - his little mat with all of his sketchbooks and crayons.
📍 Finding Your Way
Before we added in waypoints, we had our NPCs follow a schedule that was dictated by coordinates. It was sort of like, "at 1PM, walk from X123 Y123 Z123 to…” and so on. It was very hard to work with, as these numbers don’t really mean anything to humans.
To fix this, we’ve changed the number and coordinate system to waypoints. Little dots, shown below, each have an ID attached to them. Now, we can easily create schedules by typing in the waypoint IDs. “NobuKitchen” is much more understandable to humans than a string of numbers making up a specific location in 3D space.
This has made the process so much easier and quicker! This also allows us to use our schedule system to swap out certain waypoints and actions for different sets based on different conditions - like the day of the week or events.
For example, Mikan has a different schedule depending on whether or not you had anything in your shipping container that morning. If there’s nothing to sell, Mikan will stick around town instead of going to Capital City. You can see her walking to your shipping container every morning!
Here’s what the waypoints for that particular route look like in the engine:
🛒 What Can I Get You?
Shops! Every town needs their own shops! We added in updated backgrounds and character art. Shopkeepers will have little dialogue lines when you’re poking around their store. Nobu Jr. will try to guilt-trip you if you decide you don’t want to buy something anymore…
The way we have the shop system set up allows us to change the stock based on different conditions - like the day of the week and how much of the item is in-stock.
💅 Just a Touch of Polish
Something new and small we added this month is little interactable volumes we can place in various spots that will give flavor text. This is something we enjoyed in games we’ve played, so we wanted to incorporate that feeling of discovering a different world’s mundane into Snacko.
Another bit we’ve added that’s a quality-of-life change is the building area material. Instead of showing…absolutely nothing but the borders, a light grid will show up. This way, it’s more clear where you can place objects and where you can’t. Once you take out your objects to place, the area surrounding it, like before, will be a more opaque orange grid.
We also added more functionality to our dialogues! Now we have more control over things like events that can happen through dialogue, or conditions that have to be met to trigger certain dialogue lines. Below is an example of Nobu Jr.’s dialogue when he’s working:
And…that’s all for September! We have a lot of work ahead of us but it’s slowly coming together. Thank you for reading and for your support 🐾 See you next month!
Special nose boops to our patrons! Thank you for your continued support and for making Snacko possible 💕
