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snackodev · 1 month

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0.9.4 Town & Guild Update finally out! 🥂

This has been our biggest patch yet with a complete rewrite of all the villager quests~

Below are the full patch notes, but here are the highlights:

Restrictions on villagers lifted: you can now have everyone all at once!

Blueprint shop and other recipes no longer all unlocked at the beginning. All new quests have been implemented to unlock content

Villager quests have been completely redone and new ones have been added

Villager dialogue pools have been reworked to give better chances of seeing all the lines; certain lines that don’t make sense to be repeated as you befriend them will no longer be in the pool (ex: Rejka being confused why you’re talking to him in the morning despite the two of you dating)

UI changes for expanded dark mode, including an all new quest system and UI to go along with it

Crafting recipes can be tracked alongside a quest on your HUD via the crafting menu or a workbench

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS WE’RE FINALLYYYYYY DONEEEEEEE (asterisk kind of asterisk).

This is the biggest patch we’ve done since early access launch and it absolutely, irrevocably, mentally broke the two of us. We prefer to do smaller patches more frequently, but this patch just required so much tech debt to be fixed and systems to be remade there was no other way we could’ve done this.

Well, it’s almost over now. We’re still going to be working on some polish and adding some content that we couldn’t put in (like join quests), but for now, we both really, really need a day off after two and a half months of non-stop work.

It’s been so long I’m starting to make really dumb mistakes, so yeah…a day off would be nice…………

Okay, now that the main points are out of the way, it’s time for enraliYapping! ☝️🤓

🔖 Quest Progression

Gone are the days of MIAO unlocking everything. From now on, MIAO will serve as a gentle nudge for players to discover features about the game, as well as progressing through Mikan’s character arc. I’d like to add some more quests in the near future so you can get to know her own journey through Snacko Island’s revival.

To highlight how much has been changed, areas in yellow are quests that were retained from 0.9.3, everything outside of that I made for 0.9.3:

Yeah…it was a lot…….That’s why it took us forever to test and fix :(

But! I’m really excited to see how you feel about the new progression. Instead of having 300 recipes unlocked right off the bat, anything from dyes, to cooking recipes, to crafting recipes can now be unlocked in a variety of ways, usually through Guild quests.

Guilds each have their own representative(s) that will communicate with you through quests or deliveries. Each Guild rep sort of has their own personality and way of writing, and some of them even have mini story arcs within them, so I hope you enjoy getting to know everyone!

You can also unlock things via villager quests. Not only will you learn a new recipe or unlock a new shop item, you’ll also get to know them better! It’s a win-win!

We want to slowly move away from the whole “talk to NPC, give them gift, rinse repeat” cycle, as well as the “randomly trigger their friendship event when walking around”. With the quest system, we’re hoping to slowly port over those cutscenes, as well as giving players new ways to gain relationship points with the characters.

There are also changes to the quest tracker on your screen!

Now, the quest no longer disappears immediately after finishing, causing confusion. It will now stay on the HUD until you switch maps, or when you get a new quest, or when you track a different quest.

Completed quests with rewards will require you to claim these rewards. There’s a new filter inside your journal to view unclaimed rewards, as well as an animation and icon in the quest tree.

You may also find quests that have rewards on accept. Those will be denoted with a little golden ticket icon.

The quest tree itself was built in our back end SnackoEd tool on the web, and the locations of each node are then ported over into the game. Cool, right? If we were still using the old quest system, there would’ve been no way I could’ve made all these new quests for this update.

Along with the new quests also come new quest types. So, instead of just shipping something, or getting X number of items, there are also quests from villagers that will request you to place decorations or other buildables near their house.

It was a lot of work to rip out all the guts, from the way the game faded to the way the HUD rendered…but it was worth it! Snacko needed to get changed at one point so we could scale more easily, so we’re glad we bit the bullet.

Let’s all give recursive a round of applause for sacrificing their sanity! Yippee!

📝 Coming Soon

In the next couple of days, outside of fixing any nasty bugs, we’ll also be finishing up “join” type quests. These are quests that you can grab from the board and meet up with the villager and go on an adventure together! They’ll follow you around until you bring them home, so it’s a nice way to spend some time with your favourites.

For now, they’re disabled until we push that update, so you may find some “coming soon” cards in your tree or board.

You may have also noticed some quests being labelled as “story”. There’s currently two side story quests after you finish the main story, but I’d love to add more. In preparation for these, I’ve moved off a lot of the front-loaded exposition in the game.

One thing I’ve noticed is that players actually continue to read the journals spread out through the biomes. I wasn’t expecting that… So, I wanted to do something like that without just littering books everywhere. Story quests will be a continuation of that concept, where the burden of world building and lore is no longer stuffed into the mandatory main story cutscenes.

The bookshelf/tutorial UI was also updated into SnackoUI, and I’ve left myself some room and space in the data for adding notes and books you can find in the future for more lore-dumps.

Now that I’ve talked about some of the things that we had to set up the game’s systems for in the near future, let’s go back to what’s already in the game…

📐 U and I

You may have noticed some big changes in the UI! Now, with expanded dark mode, it’s no longer just the dialogue box.

There’s some improvements as well, such as the action prompt image now paired with the item indicator, instead of needing the item name to disappear before you can see which key it is.

The dialogue boxes and choices themselves also got a face lift, along with new animations and functionality. When you’re speaking to a villager about a quest, it should show the quest name on the upper right corner.

The dialogue system was rewritten as a system so we can better add new lines in the future. The old system was…prohibitive, to say the least, and it did not scale well. With these new system-level changes, we hope localization and adding more content in the future will be 100 times easier!

I mean, just look at this… I don’t want to touch this…

Now, we can use a bunch of different ways to get text into the game. Either that’s through our custom back end SnackoEd, or through a good ol’ spreadsheet.

Hehe, there’s a lot, and honestly, I’ve forgotten a lot of the polish we’ve done since it’s been two months since we started. So I hope you guys will enjoy the little touches!

Additional quality of life features added include a crafting recipe tracker. Inside the workbench or your crafting tab in the journal, you can now pin a recipe at any quantity to pin it to your HUD like it’s a quest.

You can also buy things from each shopkeeper when their store is closed. You won’t be able to speak to them directly to expand your house, but you can buy the basic goods from their shop.

🍃 Fast Like the Wind

Yay, there’s new movement tech! Double jumping wasn’t enough, so now we have a charged sword dash and pickax bounce.

When you charge up your sword, you will dash the direction you’re facing. How far you go depends on how much you’ve charged. You can also dash mid-air, and if you time it just right, you can keep dashing and “fly”. I’m not too good at this myself, but I’m sure there’s some of you that will find this a walk in the park.

The pickax bounce is when you’re mid-air, you can bounce off of anything by charging it any amount. The distance you bounce back depends on your initial velocity plus how much you’ve charged.

It makes the cutest little “bink” noise when you pull it off, so maybe you can have some fun just binking your way around town.

We also changed the charging: when you’re charging up any tool, it no longer locks you in place. You’ll move really slowly, but you’ll still be able to move.

✨ Closing Notes

I hope it made sense why we had to take such a long chunk away from updates to work on this one! The way it was done and how many underlying systems needed to be completely gutted and redone was too many, so there was no way to “split it up”, so to speak. We’re really excited to add the new things in that we can have now that the foundation for Snacko is much cleaner and easier to work with. That’s something that will get more important as we add in more features and begin the work for multiplayer.

With all that said, I think the two of us need a day off to just lay down and do nothing.

As always, if you notice anything wrong with your save file or found a bug, please let us know! We’re always happy to help you fix any issues or rectify any errors in your save file.

You can reach us through Discord (just ping us, don’t be shy!) or email.

Thank you for reading my long-winded patch notes, and we really hope you enjoy this one!

Good night!!!! 🐾

#snacko #cozy games #snackodev #farming sim #indie game

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