Devlog #41 - Scarecrow Shenanigans
Meowllo! The things we have to do pile up fast, and the days are going by faster 🙀 We covered a lot of ground last month over a variety of things, so we’ll just go over some of them briefly:
🌿 Plains Pain
We started going through the main story and implementing the dialogue, cutscenes, and quests. We’ve had the pleasure of Ken helping us wrangle all the implementation and all we had to do was play through it and fix any outstanding issues.
On paper, that sounds easy! Right?
Well, Scarecrow disagrees.
This is supposed to say turnips…
Without spoiling anything, there’s a quest where you must give a scarecrow 20 turnips. He then does a little animation. I was but a naive child when I wrote this part out, not knowing the headaches a Simple Spinning Scarecrow could cause.
There is supposed to be one (1) scarecrow. In this screenshot, there are four (4). Why are there four? Why is only one spinning? Why are there four??
How I feel about the scarecrow
We did eventually figure it out, but not after a long day of cursing and confusion.
Luckily, by the end of the Grassy Plains, we got through a lot of growing pains and were able to get through the Desert Canyon section much faster.
Here’s a bonus picture of a bug where we had some camera misconfiguration that resulted in the characters facing the opposite way. But it’s fixed now! I felt so smart 😊
📝 Taking Inventory
Snacko has a lot of stuff. Just…stuff. Lots of it. This includes recipes, furniture, buildings, NPC data…stuff.
Well, we had to start organizing the stuff so we could take inventory and make sure everything will be actually implemented in the future.
It looks a bit different depending on what sort of information it is, but now that we have everything mapped out, we’ve been going through our internal database and custom tool to make sure all the items are in, which ones need icons, which ones need an item description, etc. It’s not the most glamorous or fun work, but it’s necessary!
Part of that is also going back and realizing we’re still missing some tutorial popups 😳 Popups will occasional happen mid-cutscene during a tutorial given by Nobu or someone else, but you can also read through them at your own pace via any bookshelf. We were missing some for things like ranching and fishing, but now they’re in!
Every time you mash through a tutorial, I cry just a little bit.
And lastly…
⛏️ All Mines
We had originally shown our maze-like approach to mines in Snacko, where the layouts are procedurally generated using pieces and parts we’ve made and set up.
The art never got updated, and it finally got the makeover it deserved!
Floors, walls, foliage, and assets are now in line with what you’d expect to fit in with the rest of the game. It’s a big relief knowing we no longer have a big brown box. The top screenshot was taken 9 days prior to the bottom screenshot. The atmosphere now fits Dale’s awesome mines themes much better!
We also had an issue of seeing through the doorways would diminish the feeling of discovery, so we made a shader that fades as you get closer to you - but only once you’ve removed the blocker! We hope you have a lot of fun in the mines 💖
…And that’s all for this month! Thank you for sticking with us until the end. January had a lot going on, and development will probably keep this pace up until we hit the light at the end of the tunnel!
Thank you so much for your support, and we’ll see you next month~
Extra thank you to our Patrons and Ko-fi supporters! Without you, Snacko development would look very different. We appreciate every one of you 🐾
