Devlog #19 | Picking it up

March felt extremely long - due to a myriad of things ranging from the state of the world to the variety of work we tackled this month. Let's just get straight into it!

🍂 Season's Greetings

Have you noticed a distinct lack of color in the trees after our art overhaul? We have, too! We brought back the round fluffy trees, now 200% chonkier and brighter.

The trees and grass aren't the only things that change. There are little changes that happen in the town as well, like the grocer's changing out the crops that are growing on the roof.

If you've been following Snacko's development for a while, you might have noticed that, "wait, that doesn't look like the grocer's!" Because it's new! We have a series of new stuff this month, following last month's trend of visual updates.

🆕 The NEW Stuff

What's new this month? A lot. Furniture, buildings, trees, water, fishing...Wait, let's take it one at a time.

All the buildings got a makeover! A complete makeover! Do you recognize the red-roofed cabin? It's the carpenter shop, decked out with a nice fence and a fancy saw. It's easier to see the differences and similarities between the new buildings and old buildings in the screenshot below, where we can see a shot of Nobu's old and new house:

The overall aim with the visual rework is to try and make everything a little chunkier and a little more colorful. So far, this direction has been carefully applied to everything, from the grass to the roofs of houses. We hope to keep things consistent so the charm of the character's blocky pixels aren't lost in the environment.

There's no use having a better exterior if the interior is a mess, right? So the interior furniture objects got a refresh as well. Just as before, many of the objects are dyeable. It's always fun to view before and afters, so why not take a peek at the beech bed?

The new beech bed - on the left - has a thicker frame and a throw to complement the simple bed sheets. What do you think? We're not done yet! We also have...new crops! The crops, especially the turnip and carrot, are part of the "oldest asset club". The turnip was one of the first assets created for Snacko, before it was Snacko. The only asset to rival the seniority of the veggies is Momo's sprite.

They were in dire need of a makeover, and a makeover did they get! We also added unique seed stages. Not only does it look better, it should help you identify what you planted before things start sprouting. Vegetables that would usually require a trellis to grow now have one!

Another positive of this art change is that the texture space and polygons needed drastically reduced. The entire tomato family takes up a little less than 70 pixels!

The last thing on our "new and improved assets" list is the water! Our tech artist Ken has graced us with a fancy new water that definitely suits the game much better. It has a pixelated look to it while still being smooth, and the added translucency helps fish stand out in the water.

💡 A Bright Addition

As we tried to wrap up the farm and town map, we added a little lighthouse by the docks. We don't have a use for it yet, but we'd like to add a little interior in the future if we have a chance. It does light up at night, though! The nice thing about the new map with its added verticality is the ability to stand up high in your farm and gaze into the town's distance.

💕 Fun Features

You can...now take selfies! Hitting a button while using your camera will put you in and out of selfie mode. You can still move while you have your camera conveniently stuck in place, so you can get all sorts of (useless) photos of yourself in a tree.

We also started the very early stages of forging relationships with the villagers! There's still a bunch left to do, but at the very least, you can now read little bios of each friend and save their photos.

Our last little cool new feature is the ability to pick up items. You can now select an item in your inventory and plop it over your head and move around with it. You could toss it if you'd like. This is a video game, so you can easily carry a turnip or a house all the same.

We have some exciting and fun things in the works that we can't show off just yet. They still need some work before they can even make their first debut into the world, so look forward to it! That's all for this month...thank you all for reading, and thank you to all our patrons that support us! We'll see everynyan next month 🐾