Snacko

Momo

Mikan

Waffles

Indie Game Spotlight: Snacko ( @snackodev​ )

This week’s Indie Game Spotlight is the cat’s meow. Snacko is a farming adventure game about two kitties starting a new life on a (seemingly) deserted island with a meow-sterious past! 

We chatted with husband and wife duo, Erisa and Jordan, who are making it out of their home studio in Canada, with the main cast based on their cats. Erisa does most of the art and community stuff like blog posts and social media, and Jordan is the lead (and only) programmer on the project. Read on!

What were some major influences in making the game?

Erisa: I grew up on almost exclusively Nintendo handheld games, so a lot of Story of Seasons and Rune Factory for the gameplay, and some Pokémon games for art. For particular features like the interior decorating, I draw a lot on my experiences playing The Sims.

Jordan: Unlike Erisa, I grew up playing games on console and PC, so, while we do share some common ground (namely in the farming sim department), my tastes are quite different! I bring most of my inspiration from action-adventure games such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, early 2000s MMORPGs such as Ragnarok Online and Phantasy Star Online, and platformers such as Super Mario 64.

Aside from farming, what other activities can you do?

We have some of the more common features found in other farming games, like fishing, cooking, and taking care of farm animals. But we’ve also added some extra activities to fill your days, like part-time jobs at the local diner, exploring procedurally-generated mazes in the mines, and decorating and growing your own island community. We have some more surprises we’re excited to reveal in the coming months!

How does customization work?

There are many ways to make your Snacko experience unique to you! Your farm, the town, and your home can all be decorated using crafting recipes and building blueprints you collect during your journey. You can mix things up by dyeing your furniture, or the roofs of buildings, different colors crafted from flowers and other materials found in the wild.

Another aspect of customization in Snacko is the villagers that live on your island. As you start rebuilding the town, you’ll find yourself in need of shops or services. You can take this opportunity to post on the bulletin board for potential villagers to respond to. Depending on what you’re offering and what you’re looking for, you can have an interesting combination of villagers on your island, and place their houses at will.

We’ve spent extra care in making the controls and options for building as convenient as possible to create spaces as you imagine them in your mind. My personal favorite is the ability to rotate freely and toggle seamlessly between snap-to-grid and free placement!

What has been the biggest challenge in creating the game?

Erisa: Staying consistent. I haven’t worked on a project this big before, and once you add on the fact that I’m essentially the art director of the project, as well as my own boss, it’s been a challenge to make sure all my assets stay consistent. I’ve gotten into situations where I’ve had to redo assets because they looked fine on their own, but out of place once implemented into the game.

Jordan: Picking and choosing what ideas get to make it into the game. No matter how small and easy you think it will be to put a new idea into the game, every new idea adds complexity and needs to be polished, maintained, tested, and localized into all of our supported languages. As the game has progressed, our ideas haven’t slowed down—so having to continually fight the urge to add more can get a tad stressful!

If you could be friends with any of the game’s villagers in real life, who would it be?

Erisa: Definitely Frits! He seems like a really chill guy to hang out with after work over some chicken skewers and drinks. I think so far, Frits is my favorite character I’ve designed.

Jordan: Outside of the characters that mirror our cats’ personalities, I’d have to go with Maru. He’s one of the more down-to-earth characters in our cast, and loves when he gets time to focus on his hobbies!