Devlog #31 - Spring is Here!
Meowllo! It’s starting to warm up here and all the flowers are starting to bloom. The same goes for Snacko! This month we’ve had some progress on the overall game, as well as some new assets for the first area that’s furever spring: the Grassy Plains 🌿
🎮 Learning the ropes
We finally got the first little bite size chunk of Snacko playable in its (almost) final form! That means an opening cutscene, introducing the island, and some tutorial bits! It feels great to finally see the pieces and parts come together into a video game. Sometimes, it can be easy to forget that this is a real videogame.
Obviously, we can’t show any of that here. That would ruin the fun! You’ll just have to wait until release. Nobu Jr. couldn’t have said it better.
This came with a bunch of things like bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and little tweaks to mechanics. Those took up the big majority of our time this month! At least we squashed a ton!
We also remade some older assets that suddenly popped up in the cutscenes. The old lantern was not chunky enough. It was also one of the first assets I’ve made for Snacko. Look how many polygons there are 🙀
🎥 Cutscene work
Working on cutscenes in Unreal is kind of like having a little camera with you in the game world and setting places for it go to. In the intro cutscene, there’s a nice little fly-over of the farm, and the camera in that instance is controlled like this:
Er, don’t mind the flat cows and chicken. Of course, the actual stuff that happens in the cutscene takes a bit more work. Depending on how many things have to happen, and whether or not you’re just chatting or if someone has to give you items, it can range from being pretty simple to “ohh no”.
They’re still done over top of a code system that’s exposed to the engine’s native visual scripting, meaning it’s easy for anyone to poke their head in and look at the cutscene actions to figure out what’s going on. That’s super cool, right?
🌳 New foliage friends
The furever spring of Grassy Plains…The Plains has undergone some changes. It’s a bit more hilly with some cliffs framing the sides, and it also has new trees and flowers!
We wanted the Plains to feel distinctly different from the town and farm, as we want every other biome to also feel special. So, instead of using the usual round trees and evergreens, we now have these cool birch trees and a fluffy cypress.
