New year, same game! Welcome to 2021 🥂

We took a bit of time off at the end of the year to do non-game development things and celebrate the holidays together. From the two of us and the three studio executives Momo, Mikan, and Nobu, we hope you had a great holiday season!

🥞 Food for the eyes

This month, we did two dev streams on our Twitch channel for two Kickstarter recipes: Pandacakes and a Breakfast Burger.

Backers will usually give me a list of items that they’d like to be in the food, and provide me either drawings or photo references for the asset. We’ll then adjust the ingredient list to suit Snacko’s cooking system and items.

In the Breakfast Burger’s case, while we don’t have bacon in the traditional sense of pork, we will have a Snacko-world equivalent. We had a bit of fun with the burger on the stream:

🌟 Let there be (less) light!

One issue we’ve always had with something in Snacko was how we set the light and sky colors. We used to use curves to control the brightness, colors, and all that in the game engine.

*I can’t read this…and I picked these colors…I have no idea what they are…*

We still do, but there are different kinds of curves in Unreal, and for whatever reason, we weren’t using a color curve. We did have to change some code to have it work with our day/night cycle, so maybe I was just too dumb last year to realize it could’ve worked.

Now, it’s actually human-readable. Plus! You get to use a color picker, which saves me a lot of time. Now, it’s super easy to go in and adjust everything.

The old “night time” was also way too bright. It was so bright I couldn’t tell where my night screenshot was because I assumed it was a regular daytime one. Now, it’s much more suitably dark. I don’t even have to label which one of these is the old one, it’s quite obvious, huh?

Here’s a little time lapse. The sunset came out quite pretty! Set to one of Dale’s amazing tracks for the game.

💎 Refining

There’s more than just the workbench when it comes to making things with your own two paws. You can recycle items in your inventory using chemistry sets to distill them into their original elements. These elements are useful for feeding your sprite and in crafting recipes.