Last Orders - Devlog #10

So if you're reading this on the day I posted it, Snacktorio releases tomorrow! Very anxious to see what people make of it...

With the game finally coming out, best I wrap up all the development blogs today, so here's the last devlog for the game!

PLAY TESTING

To carry on from the last devlog, around the end of April I had pretty much 'done' everything - there was obviously a lot of testing to do, and quite a few levels would get tweaked during this month based on playtesting, either my myself or Jamie or one of the playtesters.

I think there was only ever one level I had to entirely scrap and rebuild from scratch, everything else was mostly just small tweaks - giving the player some existing items, adding a couple pre-placed wires to save some boring grunt-work, adding a bit more space to some of the more restricted levels that I'd got a bit overzealous with etc.

I personally have played through every level at least twice now, which is a lot of time spent, I think Jamie had logged about 200 hours and that was from like the 2nd island onwards. We had a small team of playtesters, while not a lot of them go through all 55 levels there was a lot of nice feedback and tweaks to basic stuff and QoL. Sitting around just playing games all day sounds fun in theory but in practice it gets very annoying replaying the same thing 20 times, and each time makes it a lot harder to judge how fun the level is anymore.

The localisation team also did QA on each of the languages, so there were little bits and bobs out of that, various bugs and then language specific rendering stuff. So yeah! I feel like I've done the most I can do now and it is what it is, now it's time to see what players actually think...

MUSIC MAESTRO

I also still had to compose all the music - I was doing the soundtrack again this time like I did for Mudborne, I had a good idea of some different themes for each island and ended up settling on doing a long looping 24m long track for each world (the old demo had 4 8m tracks that looped regardless of world). I'd already 'sketched' out the main section of each of the world themes, so now I needed to turn them into the full song.

I think the 24m length felt about right but honestly with a game that's this long I don't think you can ever fill it with enough music, and most people will probably mute and chuck on their favourite thinkin' tunes anyway, so I wasn't needing to make the next Celeste soundtrack, just some nice-enough 'muzak' to give it some vibes and fill the silence.

DEATH BY CHOCOLATE

Very late into being nearly done, we decided we wanted one more level! I'd talked with Jamie about wanting to make a reward for people getting every Witchelin Star, but then if the reward was another level, then that meant more stars so then what...

Jamie said what about a level that doesn't end, and we ended up settling on a sort of 'infinite' level where you get ranks - each 10ppm of all orders is another rank, so the limit is literally how much you can push the map! We thought it'd be funny to have you make a shit-tonne of chocolate, so we could call it 'Death By Chocolate'...

Later on with playtesting and demo players we actually saw people doing this sort of thing themselves anyway, seeing the max rate for a given level, so perhaps it's a level type we can revisit in the future to add more than just 1 right at the end of the post-game.

CUSTOM CONTENT

After everything else, I also still had to setup a bunch of modding resources and the modding guide, so that took some time to cover everything, as I wanted people to see how to make custom content, custom levels, and also custom levels that had custom content in them.

There's still a level of technical know-how required, it's not quite on the level of mario-maker, but you do get to use Tiled which is the programme I use to make all the levels, so that does make it an easy starting point as you could just copy any existing level, open it in Tiled, make a few changes, and then use the basic level template mod to upload this new version and you're done!

I've made 4 different custom levels myself, so even if people haven't started making custom levels yet there'll be a few interesting ones for people to try out if they want. I'm looking forward to seeing what sort of stuff people come up with, and get a taste of my own medicine!

OH YEAH MARKETING

Finally I still needed to do some marketing stuff along the way, my publisher was doing a lot of outreach and event stuff, and youtube/tiktok. I wanted to setup a bunch of stuff to post on x/bluesky/tumblr so spent some time recording a whole bunch of different clips to try and show off different aspects of the game. Whether that actually moved the needle at all is a different matter

I also wanted to write a couple of reddit posts, as I enjoy the longform blog style writing sometimes, and I had a couple of ideas I felt were interesting. One was on the 'original' plans for Snacktorio and how things got scrapped, talking about the old mob farm idea, lighting, architecture etc. You can read that one here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1to3fup/scrapped_concepts_and_how_my_game_changed_over/

The other one was more focused around the inspirations from Tekkit Classic (buildcraft specifically), and what things I liked and didn't like and what things became as the game developed, which I think you'll enjoy if you used to play tekkit! You can read that one here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AutomationGames/comments/1to6qt9/making_tekkit_classic_inspired_pipes_systems/

From a marketing perspective I can't say the stuff I personally did really did that much, but it was still nice to see the wave of clips on socials and also meant that I had even more clips to add to the presskit. Same with the reddit posts, it's not exactly going to get be 1000s of wishlists but I felt they were interesting to me to write, and hopefully a few people enjoyed reading them also.

And so we come to today, the day before release! I've been up since about 6am because I can't sleep (shocker), and I've probably already pushed like 10 builds to steam, tweaking tiny things, fixing the tiniest things, adding some last minute pointers to try and make the tutorial / onboarding clearer.

There's always a lot of nerves before release ofc, but I think as well for me both other games release day ends up being actually quite anti-climactic - you press the button and that's it. Players trickle in rather than a big sudden wave of stuff hitting you in the face, and there's usually only a couple die hards playing right after release (especially when it's a midweek release), so it's not like you press the button and then suddenly have 50 bugs to fix it's mostly quiet.

This time I'm going to actually try and celebrate the release, rather than be glued to the computer screen refreshing the numbers. I feel like I have done the best I can, we've playtested the hell out of it, Rekoup have done their magic, and the game is a fun funky little factory sim, and so it's out of my hands now.

If you read this and end up checking out the game tomorrow - thank you so much, and I really do hope you enjoy it! If you do, please leave a review on Steam, the first day or so is super important to showing Steam if the game is Good or Not, so every review counts <3

~ Ell