Devlog #44 - Fur-niture
Meowllo everyone! Is the weather changing for you yet? It’s still kind of cold where we are, so it feels like spring hasn’t sprung. Sad.
Anyways, this month, we have quite a lot of fixes, changes, and assets done. It was great! Let’s go over the furniture first…
📂 Orderly Categories
We used to have our stuff simply labelled “Exterior” and “Interior”. You can see how that becomes a nightmare really, really fast. A table that can be placed outdoors and indoors…which folder does it go in? I dunno.
So, the first task of the month was to have our folders and data follow the new categories we’ve assigned the buildables: in sets.
Softwood, Hardwood, Birch, and so on. My aim with this is to assign each set a different style. That way, when you unlock new furniture crafting sets by exploring new areas, you can also diversify your style. This also helps me organize the different kinds of items in each set. That way, you don’t get excited about unlocking a new kind of lumber, just to realize you can only craft 5 different kinds of chairs.
The Softwood set needed a couple of UI icons and assets that were missing, so I made those up first to call this first set done.
The little stuffed toys and miscellaneous clutter like an open book and ink bottle topped off the set. I was able to use my super powerful pixel texturing skills (see: more polygons) and fit the entire set into one 64x64 pixel texture sheet. I’m pretty proud of that.
This kind of setup also makes it easy for us to add to existing sets or make new furniture sets in the future when we have time to put in more content. Win-win!
📐 Building In-Between
Another thing we changed about building is the way that surface building areas worked. The old system had two issues:
It was done manually. Well, the new one is also done manually, but hear me out. In the past, each building area was done by making a box in the modelling program, modelling the collision of the border, and so on. It was a bit of a pain to do, and it also made the process slow.
There were borders. To prevent you from putting something completely off a surface, we made borders in the old system. Not only did this add time to making the areas, it also meant that something like counters that could perfectly snap together wouldn’t allow you to put objects on the seams of them.
But now…ta-da!
You can put them wherever, as long as the collision exists. That also means you can technically stack tables on tables, so I had to add a ceiling collision to prevent you from yeeting yourself outside of your home and into the void. Games are hard.
But, our suffering is not in vain :D
Now you can do cool things like placing two tables close together and putting something on them, like this:
We also double checked to make sure all the food items that exist can now be placed in build mode. You can decorate your home with all the dishes you make! They’ll never spoil. You know, magic.
📦 Overflow Storage
Do you see something beside the house there? The little crate is a placeholder asset, but we added overflow storage. It needs a bit of UI work, but essentially, if you get anything on your adventure and your rucksack is out of space, it’ll get sent to your overflow storage at home.
You can get items out of it, but you can’t place anything into it. No more worries about carrying too much on your trips!
🚗 Cars can Jump
In Snacko, at least.
We added jumping when you’re in your kart. We’ve had issues of being annoyed during testing having to get in and out of the kart. So, the solution is to allow the car to jump (obviously).
I’m not sure what the ramifications of making this decision will be, like speeding headfirst off the side of your farm, but we can all cross that bridge when we get there as a community.
Asides from all that, we’ve also fixed a bunch of small bugs like, “you can get stuck in the Desert Canyon if you jump off this one cliff and your feetsies touch the side”. Asides from that, this is all we have for you for April!
If you have seasonal allergies, we hope you’re hanging in there…
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 🐾
