Snacko, the cat-venture farming simulator game, has been in development since 2018. Its creators, Erisa Liu and Jordan Gonzalez, have been faithfully working on the indie game since they first had the idea. The game has undergone quite a few different changes during its development, but the current state it’s in has people excited for when the game does fully release.
In an interview with Game Rant, Erisa and Jordan discussed what inspired them to create Snacko, other games that factored into its development, and their deep love of cats. They also discussed Snacko’s involvement with Wholesome Games and its Wholesome Direct showcase, as well as the struggles that accompany working on a husband and wife team. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Game Rant: What inspired you to create Snacko?
Erisa Liu: Our cats.
Jordan Gonzalez: More specifically. Do you remember exactly when we came up with the idea?
EL: There's three facets to this. The main one was that during my junior year summer of college when you're supposed to go get internships. And that was around the time I was applying to jobs and I realized that I got into games because I like games, but then the majority, like 99 percent of the games I grew up with, were Nintendo games. So when I was applying for jobs, they were like, "Have you played our first-person shooter?" And I'm like, "No? I haven't played your shooter, I'm sorry." So they were like, "Do you like narrative shooter games?" And I'm like, "I like Mario Golf." [laughs]
And then I was just like, oh no I don't think this is going to work out. I was like, well if I'm not going to have a job this summer, we should try to do a personal project. So we were thinking like, okay I could either do my own art thing or we could work on something together because he is also a programmer, so we were like, "Let's make a game!" And then out of all the ideas, we were thinking, "What if we made a top-down Zelda-like featuring our cats?" And at the time it was the two of them, it was a black cat and a white cat, and we had all these ideas where it would be a top-down 2D Minish Cap sort of Zelda game where you would go around and whack enemies with sewing scissors.
JG: You had a fish as a weapon.
EL: There was a fish as a weapon, there was also a subway rat that would stab you with a knife. None of those are in Snacko anymore! Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on what your tastes are. But at the time that was our idea.
JG: There were two ideas, and that's one of them. The other was, and this is kind of where Snacko came from, we were sitting there thinking, "What if we had a game where it was just cats doing normal human things? Like literal, transposed into human life with like, having a job and everything. Just like life but with cats." Just thinking about that. We put that into a proof of concept form and that's actually transformed from that thing into what Snacko is currently. The early, early screenshots had a town center with a little ATM, with a 7/11-ish thing, and a little police cat on duty. Stuff like that, and then that all got ripped out.
EL: Well, we started it for fun. And then I posted it on my Twitter for fun and then people started unironically asking, "When is the game going to come out?" And I'm just like, "There is no game!" [laughs] So then, for whatever reason, I guess people really vibed with the idea of a police cat kicking you out of 7/11 so we decided like, "Okay, maybe we can make this for real." And our first plan was we were going to work on it for one year as a secondary thing and release it no matter what happens.
Obviously, it's 2021 so that didn't happen; that was back in 2018. And then I remember sitting down and being like, "Okay, if we're going to make this for real we're going to have to actually think about what kind of game this is going to be." Sorry I missed something, [I remember] Jordan specifically said, “No matter what we're going to do, we're not going to make a farming game.” Because farming games are a lot of work.
JG: I was like, "There's no way we're going to finish a farming game. That's just way too much work." And then, here we are.
EL: Whoops! I mean, it's definitely not my fault.
JG: All of that started because in that initial proof of concept, it wasn't even a proof of concept, it was just for fun, but we had a little 3 by 3 farming grid in the backyard that you could plant crops in, and I think that's what caught people's eyes. And I was like, "Oh, well I could just expand that into a bigger farm."
EL: And then we made a farming game. [laughs]
JG: So yeah, it kind of evolved over time. There wasn't really a clear decision for us to make Snacko in its current form, we just were like, "Oh, what if we changed it to be this? Oh, okay, now it's this initial concept." And we just wanted cats living life and now it's a full-fledged farming game. It still has some of the Zelda elements, some of it's there.
EL: There's a bomb arrow.
JG: It's like a Zelda, what did we call it?
EL: It's a farming sim with Zelda toppings.
GR: Did other games influence your creation of Snacko?
JG: For me, I think we both contributed different pieces and parts to what we currently have. For me, I pulled a lot of inspiration from a pretty old MMO at this point called Ragnarok Online. It's from the early 2000s, it was a Korean MMO, the music was super comfy, and that's where almost all of our soundtrack's current inspiration comes from.
And Dale, our composer, was also a big fan of that game's soundtrack as well. The company that he works for did the soundtrack for Ragnarok Online, surprisingly, so I was like, "Oh great, this is everything I wanted." The music inspiration came from that, a lot of the control and feel of the game came from that, some of the combat mechanics came from that next to some other MMOs that I've played in my early childhood, named Phantasy Star Online.
EL: Also extremely old.
JG: Yeah, everyone says [they don't know it] when I say it.
EL: That's because it was almost like a Japan-only, very niche. Honestly, it kind of plays bad.
JG: It did not age well, like it's one of those things where I'm like, "Oh I'm so nostalgic for this game," and I go back and play it and it's like, total garbage. [laughs] But I try to take the good parts from those games, because they did have good parts, and put them into Snacko. And it's weird saying that Snacko is a bunch of MMO elements but it really is.
EL: So for the art, a lot of it what we started with was I really enjoyed Pokemon Diamond, that generation of Pokemon games where they still had the pixel art but it was sort of 3D blended in, and technically Ragnarok was like that too. It was like a 2.5D game where it was all pixel-based but it had a rotatable camera so it made you feel like it was 3D but it wasn't. And then Pokemon was the same way for me, so that was where the majority of the art came from.
But gameplay-wise I played a lot of Harvest Moon growing up and I also played a lot of The Sims — that was my first addiction. I found this unwanted copy of The Sims in the back of my dad's shelf, and it was like, in Chinese, and I couldn't get through the setup portion of it because there was a long part before it let you choose a language and I just remember not knowing what it was and then thinking, "Why would you ever build walls if you could just use fences?" because it was cheaper, so all of my Sims back then lived in fences, like they were essentially animals, they were just living out in the backyard with fences [laughs]
So I think there's a lot of elements of Snacko that I kind of begged Jordan to put in. Like the entire building system, originally you could only rotate objects at ninety degree angles and then it was forty five degree angles and then I was like, "But in The Sims you can hold 'alt' and then you can rotate it however many times..." And he was like, "Okay, I'll put it in." And I was like "And in The Sims you can hold this and then you don't have to place it on the grid."
JG: I didn't want to make The Sims and a farming game [laughs] but here we are!
EL: I'm sorry. Oh yeah, and then we put in a fencing system because I was like, "In The Sims you can draw fences," and I like to draw fences.
GR: Why choose to make a cat-venture game?
EL: I really like cats.
JG: That's the funny thing too, is before I moved in with her I didn't really get cats that much. I was just like, "Oh yeah they're kind of neat," and then over time, because she only had one cat when we moved in with each other, and then over time it was like, "Oh, maybe we should get another cat."
And I was pretty adamant on "no more pets" because our apartment is pretty small, so then we got another cat and now we're getting a fourth, so. I mean, I'm all for it but it's crazy, it's too many cats [laughs] But yeah, I think we just really love cats. That being said, cats aren't the only animal in the game.
EL: There's a goat, there's a rabbit.
JG: Yeah, we have a couple different species of animals and their naming conventions are based on different cultures in real life. So for instance, the rabbit character names are inspired from Chinese names. The cat characters are inspired from Japanese names, I think the wolves are Russian.
EL: I have a whole PDF that I wrote down.
JG: I don't have it memorized but the birds are —
EL: American. I don't know, American/British because they kind of start to swim together after a while.
JG: But yeah, so it's not just cats although we kind of advertise it as a "cat-venture."
GR: What kinds of things do you have to think about when creating Snacko for PC and Switch players?
JG: That's kind of what both of us are fighting through. But on the programming end just, oh god, so many things. Because the Switch is basically, it's worse than a smartphone in terms of performance, so you have to really have to be careful with how you implement different systems that the player has control over.
For example, right now I'm dealing with optimizing the building system because you can go crazy and build everywhere on the farm and inside the town and you don't want to have the player building a ton of stuff and then having it completely kill the game's performance, so you have to do some pretty clever tricks to get around not limiting the player too much but still keeping the framerate above a certain level. And then, on the other hand, the UI design being on the Switch has driven that in a very specific direction. Our UI is very big and readable on smaller screens.
EL: I have trouble, I don't know which way it's called, I have a slightly damaged cornea on my left eye, so it's weird astigmatism where everything is slightly blurry. So then, when I'm playing on a Switch Lite, my problem with a lot of game UIs is they're meant to be played on a TV. So one thing we kind of had to think about that I had to iterate a lot on as an artist, is I feel like as an artist you always want to show off your ability to make pretty things, but then over the development of Snacko, looking at it on the Switch or looking at it as a Twitter post on my phone, you realize that at the end of the day that doesn't matter.
How readable and how usable it is is probably the most important, so you want things that are high contrast, you don't want things that are only based on color because then you're going to give yourself more work trying to implement color-blind options so it's best to just have icons and things. So even if you can't tell the colors apart, hopefully the big check mark is going to help you and things like that. Because for the PC, most people have a 20-something-inch computer monitor but it's right in front of your face. For TVs you've got something like a 40-inch but it's usually way across the room and then you've got a tiny handheld Switch in front of your face but it's also very small. So you have to consider these three different use cases and then try to make it so that in the smallest scenario possible it's still readable and the art is still legible.
Because when we first started Snacko a lot of my mistakes or problems came from hyper-focusing on little details and then you'll put it into the game and you can't see it so you wasted your time. Or you try to make the UI look good and it's really nice and it looks really good in a Twitter post and you put it into the video game and you put it on the Switch and you can't see it and it's teeny tiny. And I feel like he did touch on this, but for example the building system we obviously develop and test on the PC first, so one thing he's been working on is being considerate of gamepad support.
JG: That also influences the UI too because you don't want the experience on mouse and keyboard to be radically different from the experience on gamepad, so we have to really think about, we've had to reimplement almost every single UI at this point, so our second round is always "how do we seamlessly transfer the experience from mouse and keyboard to gamepad without it looking like a totally different UI?"
So for instance, in the building mode right now, when you go to edit a building, with a mouse and keyboard you just kind of hover over it and you get a menu that pops up and it has an indicator that says like, "This is a softwood fence, do you want to move it, put it away, dye it?" and on gamepad it looks the exact same, but when you press left and right it cycles between the different buildings in the area. So it's the same UI but it's completely different, it's just figuring out how to balance the two.
And also how to make it so that you don't have to do so much work implementing the game pad controls, because it's almost like you have to do all of the work again if you don't figure out a way to get the venn diagram of what each feature does to overlap as much as you can. I'm super glad to actually have it come out on Switch. It's been something we've been keeping to ourselves for awhile, because this has been in the works for, when did we get the dev kit?
EL: Well, we got it over a year ago. Pre-pandemic is when we got it. And then in public people would ask us on Twitter or Discord, "Is it coming to Switch?" and we would have the dev kit on our desk and say, "No, it's not coming to Switch."
JG: Not yet.
EL: Sorry, we don't know yet! [laughs]
GR: What inspired the design choice to mix 3D and 2D graphics?
JG: When we saw Octopath Traveler, I was like, "Wow that game looks amazing."
EL: And they were advertising, well they didn't advertise it, but this was before it was still called Project Octopath Traveler, so they had this behind-the-scenes dev thing and they were using the engine we were already using, so we were like, "Oh! That's cool!" [laughs]
JG: And it was funny, I guess it was kind of a mix of Octopath and Ragnarok. Well Ragnarok came in late because we decided to allow the camera to rotate because in Octopath Traveler you can't rotate the camera, everything is totally fixed.
EL: Top five things gamers don't know are really hard to implement: Number one, camera that can rotate.
JG: Well, it's easy to implement, it's hard to make the art look good.
EL: I cried a lot. He was like, "Can I put a rotatable camera?" I was like, "No, but okay."
JG: In Octopath, the camera is hard-locked to a specific perspective. You can only like, pan back and forth and sometimes when you go into different areas the camera will shift. It's all pre-planned and everything and that works great for that case, because Octopath Traveler is like, you go into a combat scenario with turn-based RPG, but we wanted to have dungeons that you can actively go through and areas of the game that you can actively go through, and when you can't rotate the camera it makes the design really hard.
So for instance, you can't have a map that has elevation and then goes back down because the previous part would block the camera, so all of the maps we had in that version of the game could only go up. And you couldn't really have hallways unless you cut the hallway away and there were a whole bunch of weird restrictions that made the game look really simple or the designs we could get away with were really simple, so I was just like, "Can we please just rotate the camera? Please?" And then she was like, "Okay fine." So that was the one thing I got.
But I think it looks so much better. The moment I put that in and I showed off a GIF of that on Twitter, it was like the first time I put that in, I was cutting down trees and stuff and rotating the camera, it was so cool. I was like, "Oh my god, this is the coolest thing ever." Even though it was super simple. [laughs] But yeah, we had a fixed camera for so long, and that was inspired by Ragnarok, it more matches the look of Ragnarok Online now because in Ragnarok all the character sprites are 2D in a 3D world.
EL: Octopath mainly drove kind of the lighting and at a point we also had tilt shift, or gaussian blur, and then we removed that because it looked good, like in Link's Awakening on the Switch, that remake also has very intense tilt-shift. It looks really, really good in the screenshot it looks very, very good in a video, but then one thing I noticed is that when you're actually playing the game it tends to give you a headache. So we just got rid of it.
I feel like Octopath drove a lot of the lighting and then it made us realize, "Okay, so you don't just have to make an older sort of PS1-era 2.5D game, you can also incorporate more modern elements like dynamic lighting or shininess, but at the end we only incorporated lighting but I think it's still, it'll look a lot better. I think we had that 2.5D-style before simply because it was the easiest way to do the game in Unreal. Unreal isn't exactly well-equipped to do pure 2D games, and then honestly the other reason is because I can't animate 3D characters well. So I was like "I'll just draw sprites." [laughs]
GR: Will the relationship between villagers ever be romantic, or will they be only friendship-based?
EL: Yes, there's romance because when there's no romance I get really sad.
JG: Is it called 'romance,' though?
EL: It's not, okay it's not technically called 'romance' and there's also no limitations. You can just choose one partner, I guess animal, we haven't really chosen the actual name yet for what this whole relationship is going to be called.
JG: Friendship plus. [laughs]
EL: No! [laughs] No, but we do have the systems in place for certain characters being romanceable and certain characters aren't. There's just no name for it yet, I honestly don't know what to call it. You can't romance Nobu Junior, you can't romance Nobu Senior, he's too old, I'm sorry. Well, he's a committed man, he's already a grandpa, he's not available. He's too busy to fall in love, sorry if you're into grandpas.
GR: What is it like working on a husband and wife team?
EL: Oh, spicy!
JG: Kind of emotional, not going to lie.
EL: Spicy!
JG: It's definitely not like my old job. For the most part, it's pretty chill, we kind of have our own realms, like I purely live in one realm, and then she's in her art realm and social media realm and we talk about things that we need to talk about. Because we have a publisher, we have a weekly status meeting that we all come together to talk about, the things we're working on, any problems we currently have, we talk about those like every day, so. But yeah, for the most part, I kind of do my own thing, she kind of does her own thing, if we ever have a conflict those are weird.
EL: Those are usually, I feel like whoever cares less gives up first. Like when we have a compromise, like in some cases where he's like, "Okay this will be easier for me to implement in code if you do this groundwork," and then I'm like, "I don't want to do the groundwork," and then he's like, "No, but listen. You only have to do it once and then it's going to be easier," and then I care less so then I'll give because it's like, "Okay yeah whatever, I'll just copy paste the numbers, that's fine." Or when it's a design issue, those things can get more heated because I feel like the two of us have not exactly opposite game tastes, but we have a very strong bias toward certain games and they come out very strong.
JG: Yeah, whenever the discussion comes to cutting something, like we have a lot of stuff planned, and she's like, "I think we should cut this thing out, I don't think we have enough time," and I'm like, "What? We can't cut that!" Just stuff like that isn't fun to deal with.
EL: In that case there is no compromise, we just have to suffer, we just can't cut anything.
JG: Yeah, we both have our deal-breakers. But yeah, it's interesting.
EL: I feel like the most significant part is, at least from my point of view as an artist, is that when you get critique back about your work, instead of it coming from a co-worker or coming from a third party like a publisher where you're like, "Okay I can take this critique, fine." It's coming from your husband, right? So now there's two conflicts of interest where I'm glad I'm getting the critique because it’s better he gives it to me than the players when it's released, but then you also have the, "Oh he doesn't think I'm good enough." So there's this, it's less of a problem now but when we first started it was like, separating work from personal life and it's like, he's not telling me I suck, this is just purely work. I feel like that is probably one of the more challenging parts for me during this process.
JG: Yeah, criticism is hard. Both ways, I guess. I feel like I take criticism better though. [laughs]
EL: You do take criticism better.
JG: You can just straight-up tell me, "This thing sucks," and I'll be like, "Okay, I'll fix it. What's wrong with it?" I don't care. The last job I had was pretty soul-crushing so I think I've just stopped caring about things.
GR: So you would say you've both gotten better about separating work from the personal stuff?
JG: Kind of. I mean it's gotten a little trickier though as the pandemic has gone on, just because not being able to not have much personal stuff kind of sucks and being home all the time and just not doing what you used to do, could get a little draining over, it's been what, eighteen months?
EL: Over a year, yeah, almost a year and a half I think.
JG: Yeah so we've kind of been in this apartment for awhile, I think that's becoming more of an issue than us working together.
EL: Because this room is our office. And we only recently got laptops so he can at least go to the living room and work or I can go to the bedroom to work. But before that it was literally the two of us in this room 24/7. The only time we left was to go to bed or to eat and then it was just like two people in the same room for a year straight and you couldn't travel, you couldn't go outside 一 I mean you could go outside but where are you going to go, Walmart? So yeah, I feel like that part is the worst but it would probably be worse if he wasn't my husband and you were just stuck with some guy for a whole year and a half in a room. [laughs] There's no separation of work/life, there's only work.
GR: Snacko was featured at Wholesome Direct 一 how did it feel to see it in the lineup? How was the reception to the trailer?
JG: We've been part of Wholesome Direct since the beginning, but when it was mentioned that it was going to be at E3 I was like, "Holy crap, this is crazy," that was unexpected.
EL: That was unexpected, we didn't know.
JG: But seeing it in Wholesome Direct is always, like whenever they ask us to be in it I'm always like, "Thank you." Because I feel like indies have a really hard time getting spotlighted and Wholesome Direct, and just the Wholesome Games in general, is a really awesome way to give these much smaller devs a more concentrated spotlight and they just do so much work, I'm just blown away by how much they do for like, all these games for nothing.
EL: It's literally volunteer work.
JG: Yeah, I don't understand 一 they've produced a record, we have a music track on a record and that still blows my mind, they got us featured in a magazine.
EL: It was started by brothers, James and Matthew, who were working on their own indie game, and I still remember this was early 2019, they reached out to me and said, "Hey, we're also making like a game ourselves and it's a sushi life sim, Rolling Hills," and then they said they were looking for small developers with similar cozy and feel-good game to start a community with.
And back then it was like six games, or five, or even less and watching them blow up over the years has been great. Because I've always loved Wholesome, the first Direct was already amazing because it was like watching a Direct but every game was really good, so it's like watching the direct and you're like, "Oh I could play all of these!"
JG: Yeah, it was also pretty similar genres, like you're not jumping between Metroid and all these different genres, they're all pretty similar.
EL: So I guess it was less of a shock because it wasn't like getting reached out to out of the blue and saying, "Oh, do you want to be in this year's Wholesome Direct?" It was like we've been part of that Wholesome Games family for awhile now but it was still very humbling to be invited because this was our third time in one of their video showcases, so it's like we've been there for every single video showcase they put out so far and it feels very warm and fuzzy inside.
JG: The amount of stuff they've done for us is insane. Like we can't thank them enough.
EL: They'll just reach out and be like "Oh, we're running this charity event for a vinyl, do you want to be part of it?" Or, "Oh, we have these t-shirts for charity during Wholesome Direct, do you want your character to be part of that?" It just makes you feel very nice.
GR: There is both a Ko-Fi and Kickstarter set up for Snacko 一 is there one platform you prefer over the other? Does one allow for easier communication with supporters than the other?
EL: They're different, I feel like. If we didn't have Patreon when we first started Snacko, Snacko would literally not have existed as it does today because the monthly funds essentially helped us pay for software and hosting, the initial soundtrack, and it still pays for our programming because there's a lot of stuff that the Kickstarter obviously doesn't cover, that the publisher funding doesn't cover, that we have to pay out of pocket and for the first year and a half before we signed with a publisher and got that first little bit of money, we were just living off savings. So it was pretty much all of our food and living expenses were limited to what we got from Patreon.
Kickstarter is completely different, Ko-Fi and Patreon for me are sort of similar, I think out of all three though, Ko-Fi has the best text editor, so I'm just going to say I like Ko-Fi the best. Kickstarter's text editor is, I swear a lot when I have to use it, but it's also the case of, "If you don't use Kickstarter, what else are you going to use?" because it has been very invaluable in reaching more people because we're pretty much stuck on Twitter but to expand beyond the bird app, Kickstarter has been really good for that. They all make it very easy, I think, to communicate with people. Discord by far is still the easiest way to just get to people so we always encourage people, "Hey if you backed, please go on Discord so I don't have to use Kickstarter's weird DM function."
When we first launched Kickstarter, we launched it in conjunction with the Wholesome Snack and it was a surprise announcement, it was like a mini teaser with some new info and at the end it was like, "Oh, by the way, we're on Kickstarter now!" And then we got a whole new influx of people and right at that time, like thirty minutes before the Snack went live, the website stopped working halfway so you would try to upload an image and then it would get stuck. And it took, I think one of the GIFs took forty minutes to upload and I was freaking out!
JG: The Wholesome Snack actually killed our main website because we had a link to the Kickstarter that was redirected through our main website, like ‘snacko.land/kickstarter,’ and so many people were hitting that that it brought it down. So that's a good problem but yeah.
EL: That's actually why we switched, we used to self-host our website and then after that day we went with Squarespace because they have the capability of handling this, and I know you asked earlier, “How was Wholesome Direct for the game?” and I think a lot of developers, not just us, were hit with a lot of traffic, and so some of the smaller ones who haven't experienced the "Wholesome Hug of Death" before had their websites go down and that should be some of the advice is if you're going to be part of the event, just pay for it, don't do your own hosting.
JG: If you do your own hosting you better make damn well sure it's good enough to handle, like, a thousand requests at once.
EL: Yeah, it was insane the amount of traffic they generated, so, yeah Kickstarter was really fun.
JG: Yeah, that was a stressful month. That was fun. Lot of stress.
GR: What are you most excited for players to experience when Snacko does release?
JG: We ran a beta test, the last public beta I think we had, when we ran that test it was always fun when I got the save file back and you would see how people built things and set up their farms and everything, at least to me. Because there were people doing things I didn't know were possible, so that was always cool. Because the game is very sandbox-y and I think it will continue to be pretty sandbox-y so seeing the designs and ways people set up their farms and their towns, to me, is what I'm most excited for.
EL: Same. It was really great seeing their screenshots and being like, "Oh, you're better at decorating your farm than I am," and it's like, "Oh no," and seeing like because we have certain items like a flower planter, but then people would use it in a certain way that you wouldn't expect, like they would use it to sandwich fences so it would look like a divider almost, and it looked really cool. It was also just interesting watching how different people played. There were people that immediately tried to pretty up their farm, and then we had this one guy that spent two hours tilling the entire farm. He didn't grow anything, he just hoed the entire farm.
I think there was one where they were trying to put down as many lamps to see when it would start tanking their framerate, that was very stressful to watch. It's just like, seeing what people do and at the time when we ran that alpha beta build, the game was very small compared to what it was now, so just kind of imagining now that you have much more freedom and functionality with the building system how much more people can kind of push it.
Because I feel like you see this with a lot of games like Minecraft or The Sims where the devs are like "Okay let's make it like this," but this whole community of creators spawned from the system that was made because I really like watching Sims builds, so I would be so happy if there were players like that for Snacko that just take whatever we made and make it look three times better. They do that in The Sims too, like they'll make little walls and then delete a place and then it'll glitch out in a way that lets you do certain things and I'm just like, "Oh my god, how do you come up with that? I want to do that."
JG: Our dyeing system, you can get pretty granular with it, I want to see what people do with that. For instance, if you have a scarecrow with a hat, trousers, the stick, and each different part of that is dyeable so you can apply whatever, and that applies to a bunch of different buildings that have a bunch of different pieces and parts to them, like the house. You have the roof shingles, the different little details on the house.
Just seeing what people do with the dye system, that's going to be exciting because as you're working on it you're just testing it to make sure it works, that it saves and loads and that when you go to a different map and come back that it all looks the same, and then you move onto the next thing because you have so much to do. So there's not a lot of time to get creative in this thing you made, which sucks, but.
EL: Yeah, I always forget we're making a game because you only experience it in a very small vacuum and sometimes when I do have to sit down to make a trailer or gameplay video and then I sit down and play it and I'm like, "Woah, it's a video game!"
JG: That always blows my mind. This was during our last build when I was just testing to make sure you could play the game just going through and playing the game for once I was just laying on the couch with the controller on and I was playing it on the TV out there and I was like, "Woah, this is a game."
I think we're probably going to have to do a lot of playing before we release it, which that's always something I wonder about, like I've had friends of mine say, "Do you think you'll play the game?" And I think about it and I'm like, "Um, I think I've played the game a lot." [laughs] But I still, I don't know, we'll see when the time comes.
EL: When you do, the few times I've played through a chunk of it and not with the intention of finding bugs or finding polish, it has been fun. I'm probably biased because it's my own game, but the few times that I have been able to play it without the pressure of trying to look for bugs, it has been nice because it's like a really weird feeling where you know you made each part of that game but you've never seen it together, or at least relaxed, so then you go play through it and you're like, "I'm playing a video game," and it's like, "No crap you're playing a video game, I hope you're playing a video game!" [laughs]
JG: It's like a chef making food all day and then at the end you still have to eat for yourself. I don't know, it's kind of weird, but I'll probably play it.
EL: I'll probably play it! Honestly, it's kind of discouraging to see people's farms and even to an extent I feel like Jordan has had better farm designs than I've had, which is sad because I have like, hundreds of hours in The Sims; you can't just be better than me, you know? Like, if you're going to be good at shooters and stuff, you can't be good at building, that's not fair.
JG: Yeah, that is kind of the unique thing about working on a farming life sim game is that it really is just a bunch of small, disconnected pieces. Like if we were working on, let's say a puzzle game, or like a platformer, that would be much more, we would be able to see the progression a lot more but when you're making a ranching system and the next second you're working on more building stuff and then the next second working on seed makers for the farm, you're like, "Oh my gosh, is the game actually progressing or am I just doing a bunch of stuff?" But eventually you come back to it and you're like, "Oh, there's a lot to do."
EL: It is also really weird when it's like, when you go through stuff you've already made and you forgot you made it. There's like, features in Snacko that we didn't know about but he made it, so obviously we knew about it.
JG: The other day, what was it, it was when I was going through the house again I was like,"When the hell did I put wallpaper? I don't remember being able to choose the floor style."
EL: So I'm sure when we actually go through and play our game for the first time it's going to be the weirdest thing because it's probably not even going to feel like our game. We're probably going to look at things and be like, "Who put that in?" It's like, it’s you. Who else would have put that in?
[End.]
Snacko is in development for PC and Switch.