Devlog #51 - Visitors
Meowllo! How was your November? We’re getting way too close to the holiday season. I can feel the Mariah Carey creeping into the speakers…
Anyways!
We’re still hard at work because Snacko doesn’t care if it’s time to sing about red-nosed quadrupeds. Luckily for us, a lot of the main breaking bugs (don’t jinx it don’t jinx it) so we’ve been able to take some internal feedback and polish the build for backers.
⛏️ It’s All Run Down!
One thing we wanted to do was to make the town feel more alive. So, that meant two things.
The first was that the town was just too empty. I wanted to give players the freedom to decorate how they wanted, but that meant the empty lots were extremely green.
And then I realized, wait. Snacko Island was abandoned, so it should have some evidence that the place was lived in, you know? Not just...suspiciously empty.
And that’s what I did. There’s broken down versions of some buildables that you’ll need to clear out of the way before you place down objects. This fills out the town during the early days of your adventure without taking away buildable space.
The second…
🦊 Tourists
Was that there was no life. Sure, you can get more villagers and shopkeepers to move to the island. But until then. It’s just you. And an old man. And Mikan, I guess.
We’ve always wanted to implement the tourist feature but kept having to put out fires with bugs. But it’s in!
All of these are Kickstarter backer characters. They’re different from villagers as they show up randomly, walk around the town, and have some little dialogue bits about themselves. Hope you enjoy meeting them!
By launch, I’d like to add some more in to really give you that RNG dice roll so you feel like your town is always bustling with visitors.
🏔️ Landmarks
One other internal feedback point was how easy it was to get lost. Even with the map, I totally understand this, because I will get lost unless I stare at a map. To try and alleviate this, I’ve put in some landmarks in the maps to hopefully give you a hint as to which direction will lead where.
For example, the lighthouse (which lights up at night!) will always take you to the town. You can see the bamboo and birch trees leading to the Grassy Plains, etc.
Hopefully this will help in addition to the signs and mini-map!
We still have a wee bit of polish to go with the UI and making sure the build is as stable as we can make it before it enters the paws of our backers, but this is the main bulk of what we worked on in November.
We’ll see you after the main holidays in our next devlog. Thank you for reading till the end! 👋
Extra thank you to our Patrons and Ko-fi supporters! Without you, Snacko development would look very different. We appreciate every one of you 🐾
