Meowllo! Spooky season is over, now it’s cake season. I mean, November is almost December, right? That’s how that works? It’s already snowing where I live, so it’s December for all I know.
Anyways! We have lots of big important things to cover this month, so I’ll leave the intro short~
Snacko will launch in Early Access on PC. Snacko 1.0 will be released in full in 2024 on PC and console!
We came to this decision after a lot of thought and discussion on where Snacko is, and where we want it to be for you, the player. This gives us time to do a final polish pass, expand on some of the existing content the way we want, localization, MORE QA, and implement community feedback!
A lot of things have factored into this, so lemme run them through you. Before that, I know it’s a lot of text, so the gist of it is:
- The game’s story and core loop is complete and playable, but there is room for more content and polish
- Localization and porting takes time to both do, and do well for a game of this genre and scope
- We want to fine-tune the pacing and balance for everything: crafting progression, relationships, all that fun stuff
- We will be working with our QA team to try to maintain save file integrity, but the possibility exists that changing content or fixing a major bug update may impact your save files as updates are released.
- I’ll post a separate update that goes into more of the dry details of how EA will look like, our plans, and the rough update schedule during the time period, along with some other important things in the future.
Now, the long version:
#1 - The game is content complete and playable from start to finish...but there’s more!
Yes, you can play through the main story. Yes, all the dialogue is written and you can do everything else you’d expect in the game, like...farm, explore, build, craft, date...cow.
But, there’s a lot of polish and balancing we’d like to adjust. We’re about a month into our Kickstarter-only beta now, and it’s been very helpful to get feedback from players, so we’d like to continue that vibe for a little longer through early access!
Part of that is yeah, it’s mostly just the two of us working on the game full-time. (Including support from some of the talented contractors we’ve worked with, of course!) The game has (unsurprisingly) ballooned into quite a hefty game over the last couple of years since we started. It sure does feel great to say “the whole game is playable now!” but it’s been long enough that we feel like the additional time will really help Snacko go from “yay” to “WAHOO”. You know what I mean?
There’s lots of stuff that is already playable but we want to improve:
- Better mines experience, more floors with more variation
- Player house expansion, wallpaper and flooring options
- Little world activities and events, more festivals
- Proposing and a more in-depth post-bonding life (don’t worry you can romance and date everyone eligible in early access!)
- UI/UX (including controllers!) polish
- Better tutorials and documentation in the game for those of us that need more help (me, that’s me. I need more help)
- More accessibility options and better settings
- Additional craftables
- ...and obviously, bug fixes
For weaker computers and consoles especially, we want to dedicate time to make sure it runs well and feels really good with a controller to play. These are things that will take us some time and a couple rounds of playtesting and fine-tuning to really get right, but we think having the game play well on both keyboard/mouse and controller with a stable framerate is very important!
In fact, the month of October was heavily focused on making UI/UX improvements. We’ve been working on a new system (we call it SnackoUI, very original) that has made it easier to make functional buttons and screens that will just work with controllers. It’s very exciting.
(Keep in mind at this point when this message was sent, I haven’t seen recursive in a whole week. We live in the same house. He is my husband.)
Poor recursive did...wilt a little bit creating the system, but it’ll make things go much faster (with less bugs) in the near future. In fact, we’re already reaping the rewards now! No more “1 business day spent on a single UI screen to get it to work with a controller”!!!
Zoro also spent time profiling where a lot of the performance bottlenecks were and remaking certain portions of features to improve it.
Now, with the worries of “oh no not another UI screen” out of the way, we’ve been able to spruce up some existing screens to make them feel and play better.
(Before!)
(Now!!!)
The poor arcade machine at the grocer’s just...Yeah, it was rough.
#2 - Some other things just take (more) time
PC is relatively easy to test on, make fixes for, and update. But that kind of exponentially grows as you tack on more things, like other languages and console releases.
While working on finalizing the text earlier this year, it became pretty limiting to keep the text as-is and not make any more changes or additions. It became clear that we just had to add more text, especially with small tutorials and other flavor text to help the world come together.
But unfortunately, the process of writing, making sure I didn’t spell mackerel wrong again, sending it off to get localized, reimported, QA’d in the new language...
It’s just a lot of time and effort. With the two of us, it meant if we were working on localization implementation, we couldn’t work on bug fixing or polish. So, we decided to focus on making the base game better before worrying about controller support or additional language support.
#3 Game big playing hard
So like, I guess I never thought about this in depth, but one of the downsides of having a more sand-boxy type of game where you have a lot to collect and craft and a lot of characters to talk to means that it’ll also take a long time to test.
Sure, we’ve got debug commands and systems to help us test if something works, but people have to actually play through it to see when the pacing feels off, or when an activity or goal is just too grindy.
Bubbafare, one of our long-time supporters, was a huge help as they played...a hundred hours during beta.
Not sure how, but thank you very much.
So, early access will give us more time to nudge numbers back and forth and play more of the game ourselves to see where we can improve the experience. One feature we’d like to implement that was a brainchild from beta and Discord suggestions was difficulty modes. An easier difficulty setting would make days longer, actions cost less stamina, etc.
Anyways, I’m starting to ramble (I started to ramble 8 paragraphs ago my bad).
At the end of the day, Snacko is our baby. Well, a 5 year old child at this point. Bro’s in kindergarten already. But it’s a game that we’ve put a lot into, and we want to really make sure that the full release alongside the console versions live up to the effort and love we’ve put into the game so far.
(Snacko in 2019! Wait, look how different the inside of the player house looks, too!)
Optimization, polish, balancing tweaks, bug fixes...I’m just very, very happy we’re finally at the point in development where we can worry about things like this, versus implementing basic things, like cutscenes.
Thank you very, veryveryvery much for reading all of this, and reading all of my updates.