Been a while since I last wrote something for Snacktorio - over 3 months now! Last time I was finishing up the demo and looking for a publisher, fast forward since November the new demo has been released, I've about 50% the way through development of the full game, and I found and signed with someone for Snacktorio's marketing + PR!

There's also now a TNgineer forums!
https://tngineers.com/forums/index.php
I've always wanted to have a forum and bring back the "good ol' days" of internet forums, and I also wanted a place people could come to that isn't Steam or Discord. I'm hoping to spruce it all up over the next few months, plus add in all the old devlogs from Ko-Fi backdated so they're all in one place!

NEW DEMO
So the new demo got finished up, and then released! I spent some time getting some footage to make a little teaser trailer for socials+steam, and some new screenshots to show off some of the content.

At the time of writing this, I'm about to enter it into Steam's NextFest - still a bit unsure what people will make of it, but it's been positive feedback from all the playtesters and the few that have tried it out early so there's no more I can do now it's in the hands of the People. I also just finished up getting Simplified Chinese into the demo as the new publisher works with a Chinese partner on a lot of PR stuff and we all felt it'd be good to have the demo localised for them to make a bigger impact.

It just ended up quite tight with the rough timelines I had for full game development, but I got it done in time, and I'll be interested to see how much of an impact it makes with the regional stats.

PUBLISHER ROUND 3
So I did end up getting a new publisher to help with Snacktorio - this time I went with a company called REKOUP (https://re-koup.com/), who do a sort of ghost publisher/co-publishing situation where they are more behind the scenes. I was originally thinking to go with Future Friends after Mudborne as I had zero complaints working with them but they didn't seem as interested in this one vs Mudborne, which is fair enough I don't think every game is right for every publisher.

I think as well for me it's a different genre entirely from APICO/Mudborne, so it's a different audience and I wanted to try something else - plus REKOUP have had some experience specifically with this sort of game.

They have been good so far, but also still early days. The first big event will be this NextFest on 23rd, coupled with a few other events they got my into, so I'll have a bit better feel for how it's going after that.

INGREDIENT STATUSES
After finishing up the demo, I had some people playtesting it privately while I started working on... well everything. I went through every island in the game, designed all the ingredients for that island, implemented them all, and then started working through all the specific ingredient 'status' mechanics the game has - shelf-life, food poisoning, overpowering, allergens, fiery, and dairy.

I touch on it with overpowering items in the demo (items that 'take over' another item when met in the pipe), but I really wanted to make some interesting mechanics around the fact that items are physical 'things' in the pipes, vs how in some factory games it's sometimes just 'this is a belt with x per second'. Having the items actual entities moving through your system was a throwback to tekkit classic and I felt like you could do something interesting with it.

Shelf-life is like a 'time' an ingredient has before it changes, either rotting (eggs), going sour (cream), or simply rising (bread dough). Every tile they move is 1 second, so 1 second off the timer. Machines are 'refrigerated' so they stop the clock, but you have to change up your approach to make sure you get the ingredient in the right 'state' for your recipes.

Food poisoning is a status that spreads to other ingredients, but it doesn't change the ingredient like overpowering, just marks it as poisoned and if your final dish is poisoned the beasts will reject it. Allergens work similarly but they also spread to machines, so if you handle nuts in a sorting machine, the sorter has trace allergens and anything else going through it will have allergens - and some beasts are allergic and will reject a dish with allergens.

Fiery ingredients are anything made with hot sauce, and are extremely hot and require the beast to be provided with "pepta dismal" (aka: legally distinct indigestion goop), so you need to manage a sort of 'subrecipe' and provide that at all times to let the beast accept the fiery foods it wants. Pepta is also a 'dairy' ingredient, which is anything made from roach milk, and if a fiery item touches a dairy item it clogs the pipe, essentially making it a 'block'.

There's a couple other mechanics as well but I won't spoil everything, but safe to say there was a lot to introduce. But from a technical perspective it wasn't much code to actually handle - I updated my parcels/items/slots to all be able to carry status flags, and then parcels already have a mega controller that handles their movement every 1s, as well as deduping, so I could slot in some logic here to spread flags or change items or count down a timer.

All this mechanics make for you having to be more and more careful of how you manage ingredients, and are all aimed at making sure you can't just shove everything in one pipe and call it a day. It can get quite complex but I introduce it slowly per island. Tomato island (the one in the demo) doesn't really introduce much outside overpowering ingredients. Garlic island brings dairy and shelf-life (which go hand-in-hand, with say cheese aging over time), and touches on food poisoning a slight bit, then Chilli island brings in fiery foods, food poisoning properly with raw meat, and then allergens. By the time you're on chilli island you've done about 30 levels worth so I feel you're about the right place for things to start getting tricky, and it is the final 'main' island before the 'boss' island (the Capital).

With all these done and working, I had a few other machines and utilities to do - not as much as you'd think as most the game uses all the machines in the demo. The only new ones were Infusers (use ingredient to 'change' a fluid node), Coolers (delay shelf-life, freeze foods), and Drizzlers (pour liquid over items on a conveyor belt). Oh yeah, there's conveyor belts now! These are mainly setup as a 'movement' upgrade for you if you want, as it's essentially a horizontal pipe that makes you run faster, but later in the game we use it with the drizzling machines for some fun post-game stuff (spoilers!). After they were all implemented I was essentially 'done' with the core mechanics for the game, now I could move onto the bulk of the game, the actual level design.


DESIGN SLOG
With all the mechanics now actually done, the rest of the game development is pretty much just designing a fuck tonne of levels. I had already planned out the levels roughly a while back, but I spent some more time going through each level for each island and deciding what the actual challenge was going to be. At this point I didn't know exactly what dishes it would be, but I knew the main ingredients and mechanics we'd be playing with, so I had a good idea what the 'trick' or main feature of a level would be, as for at least each mechanic I wanted 2 levels (one to introduce, one to test), so that fleshed them all out to start with.

I then started working through each island and coming up with the actual recipes for each island. I had the set of ingredients for each island, and from that I could look for different dishes using those base ingredients (shout out to wikipedia for having weird little 'list of tomato based dishes' type pages), which helped me look for stuff from around the world rather than just in western food, as I wanted to get a range from all over.

After my first pass I tallied up all the countries and Italy and Mexico were the top dogs so I spent some time finding alternative recipes for similar food. For example, instead of Lasagne, there is the greek dish, Patitsio, with similar base ingredients. Instead of Arancini, Brazil has there own version of the same breaded rice ball concept (Bolinho de Arroz).

This took me to the end of November and then I had one more mammoth task that I wanted to get done before the year ended so I could start 2026 with just level design - I needed to do a LOT of writing. I wanted to get a big chunk done for localisation to start, I couldn't do any dialogue or story stuff as that would depend on the levels (i.e. the bot telling you X resource is over THERE, I can't predict that stuff) but I could do every ingredient, tooltip, UI element, recipe lore + steps, and all beasts and their lore.

For the beasts, originally I was going to do references to chefs from all over the world, but had a vision of the future when some beloved tv chef inevitably is found out to have done something horrible and having to patch out an abuser from the game. Jamie was helping research chefs, and had jotted down a note about food 'concepts', like Susuru in Japan (すする) which is the slurping of a meal to show appreciate. I knew immedietely that's more what I wanted, so we switched tacks (after Jamie has narrowed down a list of 140 chefs, sorry bro) and started finding food concepts or sayings from all over the world that would then go on to be the beasts. This also helped inspire their book entries, as I could talk about that concept in the in-game world equivilent.

The whole month was basically just writing. I already knew the story and the flow of the game, so knew where everything needed to lead and had some general background/history to work off, but there was still a lot to narrow down in the world lore (where do beasts come from, why, how was this meal deal thing setup, how does eating food work etc) so we decided all of that and then could start writing all the book entries. For the recipes I wanted to channel the online recipe blog vibes where they talk about anything but the actual dish, or talk about some random ass story that they then try and bring back to the recipe, so we used that format to do some world building and talk about all sorts of stuff (or just take the piss out of a food concept IRL).

With that done it was time to finally have a break for the holidays, and get properly stuck in with everything else in the new year. At the start of January I had a few admin tasks to do (preparing new store screenshots, trailer clips, preparing assets for presskits etc), but then could get back into things by carrying on where the demo left off.

TOMATO ISLAND
In the demo the game ends at W1-3, but with a bonus level W1-BX. In the full game there's a few other levels to play before you can unlock the bonus, 2 main levels and another bonus level. Before I could start designing them however I needed to map out all the islands roughly as I wanted an idea of the progression and how you travel across the areas.

To do this I started drawing on paper like I did for Mudborne's world, but found it hard to plan with the isometric view. At a trip to hobbycraft I saw these little plastic brick things - Simbrix. They're like those little plastic iron beads, but you can take them apart. I thought this would be a way better way to visualise everything, so got a bunch of them and started building! Here's the tutorial island from the game in brick land:

Probably the most fun I'd had so far designing this game tbh! I mapped out all the islands (tutorial, big 3, capital and postgame) and roughly where all the levels would sit in the progression. It was then easy for me to put this into Tiled for the actual overworld map and add any nice decor or little extra islands for balance. Basically I have layers of blocks, and then special layers for the level node positions (which get loaded as buttons) and then another layer for the paths which you can see below in pink. The paths get loaded and then only rendered based on level progress.

Designing the other few levels was a bit slow, as I had a couple new things to test - while I had already added all mechanics I hadn't properly battle tested them, so for example conveyor belts which get introduced in a bonus level had some pathing jank to clean up which I only really found out when trying to use them properly for a level. I also went back and re-did the other two bonus levels, as I wanted every level to always have a recipe or two - even if it was small. That way I could introduce certain ingredients in the bonus levels early before you play with them, and it feels natural because you're still making a real dish even if it's not for a beast.

I then needed to design the 'miniboss' level - each of the three islands has a strange new beast that doesn't tell you what it wants, so you have to try some different recipes and it rejects what it doesn't like until you narrow down something. This meant needing to implement this system and having 'cancelled' orders so it took some time to setup, but once it was done I wouldn't have to do it again in future.

Garlic Island
One island down, 4 to go! Garlic island introduces the shelf-life mechanics, which I'd already coded in along with all the ingredients, so I could just focus on actually designing the levels and the challenges involved. The first few levels are just introducing the concept, you get new types of eggs that 'go bad' if you leave them too long, and bread you have to rise before cooking by leaving it in the pipe long enough.

Then I introduce dairy and other stuff with shelf-life, and start introducing things you actually want to go off, like aged cheese or recipes that use rotten eggs. By using the fixed 'factory' areas in levels I can create some fun restrictions and puzzles, so combined with shelf-life can make some interesting 'how do I get this here in time?' type scenarios. Towards the end of the island is some more extreme challenges, including the first of two 'timed' levels (fast food wink wink), where you have an hour to complete 3 orders or you fail the level and have to start again (yea... thats why there's only two of them lol). The island culminates in a bonus level where a 5s rule is in place - ALL ingredients have a shelf-life of 5s or they turn into sludge, and it's as messy as it sounds.

I'd say about halfway through this island I finally felt like 1. I was getting into a groove with designing the levels and was averaging about 2 a day and 2. The game was actually Fun. After designing each level I test it fully end-to-end, just to see anything obviously annoying or wrong, and for most levels I was actively enjoying them while playing, which is a nice change! The only thing I'll need to do is make sure more people test the levels, as I always know the trick and what the level is trying to teach you/show you, so I need fresh eyes who don't have that insider knowledge to check them all - but I'd be very surprised if I've designed any so far that are so badly wrong I need to scrap it.

What's Next?
So I still need to finish up Chilli island, the Capital, and the post-game content. Also now I feel like like I had a better handle on how to design some of the levels generally, so there's a few tomato levels I'll probably revisit now that I have got a better feel for things and how they play, but I can do that later on. Right now the challenge is designing all these levels by the end of March because I need to give Warlocs enough time to localise everything, so I want to have all the levels done as that's the bulk of the text for the game. After that it'll just be all polish/testing so I'll have plenty of time to tweak levels or make them prettier, or add new shortcuts and qol features.

As of writing I'm currently a 1/3 of the way through Chilli island, and there's some very long levels in this island so it's starting to take far longer to test than it to design them. Also NextFest is about to start so I imagine I'll get pulled away to fix some bugs with that, but right now I'm still feeling okay about the timelines, so fingers crossed!

~ Ell