Snaccoon's first trailer premiered at Gamescom this month!
I hadn't intended on doing a trailer for Snaccoon for quite a while. While a lot of stuff was prototyped back in 2020 and iterated on here and there, a lot of it (most of it) is being/has been rewritten as of May of this year, shortly after the first blog post that pulled attention to the project. However, I was invited at the tail-end of June to showcase the game at Gamescom in trailer form, and it seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass on. I had numerous conversations with my employer to gauge their comfort level with me pursuing this (Snaccoon is being worked on in my off-hours, my primary job is doing tech-art/procedural stuff at Heart Machine) and after some healthy back & forth, I was given the green light.
After getting the all-clear, it was a mad dash to refactor or standup numerous systems & scenes in service of the trailer, which needed to be submitted by August 5th. I had about 4 weeks total to build an acceptable presentation, and while I'm happy with the outcome, I definitely had to make some concessions & cuts to hit that deadline. This ate up most of my time in July, and as such the devlog for that month was a bit thin. This month's devlog is, regrettably, thinner, as the big push & stress to get the trailer done on time consumed all of my energy, and so I decided to take things easy on the development side & focus on community outreach & preparing for the premier. Burnout is real, and it's something I need to be extremely careful to avoid, otherwise I'll wind up letting a lot of people down. Additionally, I didn't realize just how much time & attention something like this takes up, as this is the first time I've had a game premier at anywhere near this scale. The dev work that I did get done was either tiered specifically towards the trailer (which can be seen at www.snaccoon.com) or in service of cleaning up/organizing my project files/directories.
While getting the trailer ready & gearing up for the premier was taxing & stressful, I'm very, very glad that I did it. Across all platforms it's been viewed over 150,000 times by people all over the world, spawned numerous games journalism articles, and connected me with a ton of people. I feel like Snaccoon is on the map now, and the massive flood of messages conveying excitement & enjoyment from the trailer is indescribably motivating. There's still a long way to go, but this feels like a pretty awesome step in Snaccoon's development journey.
My goal with these blog posts is to share every facet of game development, not just design notes & gifs. While sharing easily snacc-able content is a massive focus for me, when it's just me doing it, I need to wear a bajillion hats, and so sometimes these blogs might be more about community stuff or maintenance stuff or stuff besides the cool flashy bits; I'm nervous to publish this post because I feel like I didn't get much done in moving the game along, but I'm cautiously optimistic that most people will be understanding. Okay, enough of me over-explaining myself! I want to end this post with some special thanks & shout-outs for helping make the Snaccoon trailer reveal the success that it was!
Caleb Haynes of hey, ILY! fame composed & produced the backing track for the trailer. Absolutely killed it, was super flexible & open to my notes/requests, but also has a very unique style and musical sensibility that is hard to find.
James Jarvis reached out & invited me to show off Snaccoon at the Future Games show. He and his team were SO kind & held my hand as I stumbled through the behind-the-scenes dealings that go into something like this, of which I was previously totally unexposed to.
Heart Machine pays me to make video games every day, which is already freaking bananas, but they thought that wasn't cool enough and decided to let me pursue my passion project and even show it off in a big way. Most studios out there have a zero tolerance policy on even working on side projects for fun and claim ownership of anything you make on or off the clock, and I'm so grateful to work for people who don't suck.
Numerous gaming collectives, journalism sites, YouTube/Twitch channels etc signal-boosted the hell out of this trailer. One that stands out bigtime though is Wholesome Games, a group that I'd already wanted to work with and was planning out the right time to reach out to, gave the trailer a special shoutout on several of their channels, and just on their Twitter post for the trailer, got it to over 100K views. Absolutely WILD.
My friends & family have been supporting my ridiculous goals for years, and it was no different here when I needed feedback, people to vent to, and words of encouragement. While plenty of people contributed in this way, my wife and kids are my biggest source of support, and I couldn't have done anything I've done in games without them, including and especially this.
That's all for now! Thank you to everyone who's reached out, watched the trailer, showed support, and read these blog posts. This whole experience has continually blown my mind and I can't wait to see what comes next, and moreover, I can't wait to show you all what I have planned for Snaccoon! ❤ OH! I wrote this post out at separate times so I almost forgot to include this - you can wishlist Snaccoon on Steam NOW!
Cheers!