HELLO EVERYONE I’m like half a month late with this, but! There’s a good reason!
Snacko beta for Kickstarter backers has been released! Into the wild! Live!! Playable!
Actually, that was like, almost two weeks ago at this point. But because of the beta release, I have been a withered husk of a person. My Slack profile picture really encapsulates how I feel right now.
(If you haven’t, you should totally read the webtoon “The Greatest Estate Developer”!!)
I have re-alived myself to report what we’ve been up to!
🐛 NASTY BUGS
Well, obviously, lots of bug fixes. We went through internal QA, but bugs always slip through the cracks. They are simply too small. We probably spent the first 4 days doing nonstop fixes for things like falling out of a collision hole, etc.
Luckily, there was nothing huge. So, we are alive and happy with how it went.
Right before the launch though, we had a lot of super special surprising (SSS) bugs pop out of nowhere. Like, literally, where did you guys come from?
My favourite, that dealt severe spiritual damage to my already weak psyche, was this one:
We were working in a voice call together. Motivated by the beta launch in the horizon, the three of us work quietly, excited to wrap up the build for the night for QA to test in the morning.
And then suddenly, Zoro asks,
“Hey, um…is your guys’ house…sideways?”
Silence.
Recursive, worried, responds, “what do you mean…sideways?”
Zoro pauses, unable to find the words. “I went in the house, and when I came back out, the world was upside down. And now the house is in the floor. When I jump up…I jump…sideways?”
Nobody makes a sound. The implications of this world-turning (literal) bug happening 24 hours before the beta is set to go live weighs heavily in the call.
After a moment of confusion, I sheepishly ask, “can you show us? Through screen share?”
Zoro turns on his screen share.
Mind you, at this point, I was already on the brink of tears for a whole week after the whole main scenario refused to work despite the story being tested and played through multiple times by QA at this point (it was easy bug to fix…happened because we added debug functionality). So, I did have a wee bit of a freak out but it ended up being an easy bug to fix.
Asides from doing hotfixes, we’ve also worked on other things! So don’t worry, the rest of the devlog will have many pictures for your enjoyment.
🧼 POLISH
“Make Mesecina statue less ugly” has always been on my to-do list, I just never had the chance to work on it on top of the more pressing bugs. But last month, I did! Left is the old one, right is the new one!
Along with the visual rework, you can now obtain a quest while interacting with it. The statue, broken as you arrive, can be fixed up. Maybe if you pay a visit to it once a day often, something good might happen!
I totally did not want to implement that into the game because I recently got back into Neopets and found myself enjoying doing the dailies…
While we were working on an item duplicating bug with the seedmaker, I also realized the old seed maker was just a little…old.
We also felt like the interact prompt pop-up that often comes up also blocked a lot of the screen. With these two things in mind, we’ve…
- made the seed maker asset more aligned with the other assets
- made the pop-up indicator for how many seeds less…stretched
- instead of 3 sad seeds when the seed maker has something produced, there’s now different colored seed piles depending on which seeds it’s currently making!
- made the interact prompt a little smaller and reduced the opacity for the text portion so you’re not losing as much vision on your screen. The key portion is kept opaque since the readability of which button to press > what the prompt text is
The alembic also got a similar treatment, getting a cute little animation, some VFX, and an all new indicator for what elemental fragments it has distilled so far.
And lastly, for the longest time, you couldn’t place any of the crops as a buildable. It was marked as a buildable, but when you tried to actually place a turnip or something, the game would give you an error. So I fixed that! I put em in lil baskets.
All crops now can be placed as a decorative object. Nice!
That’s all we have for this…I mean, last month. I’ll see you in November 👋 Thank you for reading until the end! Getting to Kickstarter beta was a huge milestone for us, so thank you for being patient with us as we put out fires etc etc.