Meowllo everyone! It’s already June but it doesn’t feel like it, huh? This month was quite hefty, including a fully funded Kickstarter! Wow!! Thank you for all your support - we really appreciate it. The campaign took a bit of time out of our regular schedule, but we were still able to make good progress! This devlog is going to be a long one…

🍔 New foods!

We started adding the 3D assets to some existing recipes - the Carrot Cake and Catfish Sandwich are our newest ones!

All of these can be placed on surfaces (or on the floor…if you don’t mind putting your food on the floor) as decorations, or eaten. Thanks to some Snacko magic, food never goes bad, so feel free to display all your cakes in your room.

🐱 Introducing Nobu Jr.

You’ve probably seen Nobu Jr. on our Twitter or through a Kickstarter update, but we’d like to formally introduce this tiny boy.

Nobu Jr. will arrive on your island to live with his gramps, Nobu, when the island has been developed a bit. Nobu Jr. aspires to be a rancher, and growing up in Capital City that just wasn’t an easy task. Nobu took this opportunity to invite his grandson to live with him and experience the life of a cow-wrangler. You can buy cows and chickens from Nobu Jr., along with supplies.

Nobu Jr. is based on one of our cats, Nobu. It’s confusing, because we made Nobu (the character) first, and got Nobu (the cat) later. We didn’t plan to name Nobu (the cat) Nobu, but it seemed to fit him, so we named him Nobu. Now we have too many Nobus.

Nobu Jr. has a very cute walk cycle, so we hope you’ll like him! He’s very small - around the size of a chicken sprite - but full of purrsonality.

🪑 New coat of paint

We had a couple of leftover objects here and there that needed that polish to match our current art style. Below, you can see the comparison of the front and back of the new (left) and old (right) Small Workbench.

We also have a new bowl of fruit - five times less the polygons, now with bananas! You can also dye to change the color of the bowl now. The storage container also went on a polygon diet. We think everyone looks much brighter and happier now!

We can’t just fix the 3D assets without fixing the icons - the older icons were also given a makeover.

⛅ Brighter skies

We felt like the old colors were a little dull, and washed out the environment overall. We also changed the lighting a bit, as we realized darkening the game too much at night or in places like the caves made it hard to see unless your monitor was extremely bright in a dark room (because that’s how we work). Once we tried looking at the game on a different monitor in daylight, we realized you couldn’t see anything! So we had to brighten it up.

🍃 It’s windy out there

We added wind! Well, there was always wind in the farm grass, but nothing else. So it was a little weird. Now there’s wind on the crops as well, to make it feel more alive. We also moved the data controlling the wind into a little collection so we can control it globally at runtime. This means we can do cool stuff like make it windy on rainy days.

✨ New stuff

Well, all the other stuff was new, too. But these are things I couldn’t lump in with the other categories, so here’s just a list of “other stuff we did this month”.

You can now cut down the grass, flowers, branches, stumps, trees, and break the rocks around the world! It’s no longer limited to your farm. Grass and flowers can grow back, and rocks will reappear given time, but you have to replant trees. Don’t take more than you need! We also changed the way the debris and foliage in the world is handled - recursive did some ameowzing code wizardry, and now it’s much more optimized. This means we can have fun things happen to the objects - like the ability to cut them - without destroying the performance.

Maru has new portraits to match the new style! Poor Maru, he really got spooked by whatever he saw, huh? Now all the old villagers are updated with new portraits.

Since we updated the way some buildings look, the icons had to match, too. We finally went in and fixed them all!

Whew, that was a long devlog, huh? But we’re finally at the end! Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy seeing our progress every month! Extra thanks to everyone who has backed our Kickstarter, and our patrons that have been supporting us 💖

That’s all for this week! We’ll see you in July 🐾

Devlog #22 | Extra Big Month