– By Senator Anon

Snoot Game as a project originally started on /v/ and from its onset was a race to complete the game before Goodbye Volcano High released. We succeeded in this and the story has been told many times among many people. Today however, we will be sharing a more internal look at the game’s development, or more aptly: How we took a bunch of anons with zero resources and zero outside help and made a game from nothing.

Concepting Stage, ten-second-ideas

Starting out, our dev server was populated with an active group of anons, many of whom would simply end up dropping off or lurking, and the rest of which would become the development team. We had some artists, some writers, and a deadline of only three months (we expected the project to be significantly smaller at the time, more on this later.).

First things first, we had to start coming up with more ideas for the story, and we threw around all sorts of bits and gags that we considered, but ultimately dropped.

Some ideas that were brought up during these brainstorming sessions but never made it to any planning stage:
-‘Anon’ with a dinosaur mask, blending in with the dino population as an outsider.
-‘4chan’ being a physical location in the story in the form of a large building, acting as an ethnostate Anon was a part of. He would bring Fang there at some point.
-Reed being a ‘trans-raptor’, having different dino parts stapled to him.
-Calling our group ‘Ungadev’ (name was brought up at the same time as Cavemanon)
-A joke meteor ending (variations of this idea were joked about all through development)
-Anon being the shade of bright green a 4chan anon is occasionally depicted as.
At the time, the ideas that won out were more closely grounded in reality, regardless of if the project would be a comedy parody or something more we decided a consistent setting would be important.

First big changes to story.

The writers knew that before all else, they should have proper instructions for how the story should go. We had a greentext that provided something resembling a storyline and some advice on how to make it more excellent. From this, we got the ideas for a logic-gate choice system, where the game tallies scores for both your character and Fang, and gives you an ending based on these scores. We knew generally what each of these four endings would be as well. What we needed was a proper, articulate synopsis of the storyline, broken down by chapter.

The writers and other invested anons all joined a voice call and wrote out what would become the guide for writing the first draft of Snoot Game, attached below.

Of course, this only served as a general guide from the start of development, as things went on and the game’s themes became more refined, we ended up developing them more, specifically with the direction behind endings 3 and 4. We had some great advice from /lit/ anon regarding the direction, but we ended up deviating from the specifics rather heavily so as not to portray turning to Christ as any sort of negative development. Instead, we would intend to write it in a more realistic way, that Fang is able to keep a happy life despite all of her trauma and guilt by reaching out to God. Personally, I believe that endings 3 and 4 would look rather similar long-term.

Second Draft Changes

Using the above chapter synopsis breakdown, we were able to write a whole script with a start and an ending, but it wasn’t truly great yet. There were a lot of wonky areas, and the first half of the game was suffering from us still figuring things out and picking up steam.

As written in the ‘Drafts’ section of our article How 2 Snoot It Up: Part 3, we wrote about Snoot Game’s second draft, where we said:

For Snoot Game, the second draft included writing whole new chapters (the gardening chapter), including new characters (Rosa and Stella were scarcely written in at all, only having a few lines each), and an entire rewrite of the first act of the story (everything up to the rooftop scene) to flow better and have more compelling drama.

This new draft also ended up changing ending three quite a bit more as well, in the earlier draft this ending was short and rather dull. It was lonely, but not in any artistic or profound way, only a boring way that did not carry any tone. The way we fixed this in the next iteration was by including more of a ‘memory lane’ angle to the ending, between Moes’ restaurant, trying to see the old school, and so on. We’d wanted to include a scene with the rest of Fang’s family, but couldn’t find a tonally appropriate place to do so that wouldn’t affect the pacing negatively.

Overall, by the end of the second draft the game was shaping up to the Snoot Game that everyone knows, but it wasn’t quite there yet. Our ‘third draft’ process is more of an open script scenario, where the writers and proofreaders simply point out whatever area seems strange to them to be fixed individually.
After the game had it’s first release, we started realizing more that certain characters had arcs that were simply unfinished. We didn’t have anywhere in the main story to develop them more without wrecking the pacing, so we got the idea to make bonus chapters to provide more insight to them. The main goal of the bonus chapters was to provide nice conclusions to Naomi and Trish’s character arcs and flesh out their characters a lot more.

Art Direction: Getting A Similar Style To GVH

Here’s what our lead artist has to say about getting the art direction for snoot game:

The early guys wanted to change the designs because it’s very easy to say “we’re gonna have better art than they will” and actually pull it off. At the time I knew how you could go about pulling it off several sprites, backgrounds and cgs, but I didn’t want to do better designs than GVH because the whole point of the project -for me, at least- is to do something better with exactly what GVH is working with, and also because it’s my personal philosophy that if you like a character/design then you should have personal preference over seeing them represented as on-model as possible and not get carried away with personal tweaks. I wanted to depict Fang as accurately as she appeared in the official art, a lot of people say that we took her design and “improved it” by slightly changing a thing here or there, I didn’t have a lot of art from KO_OP to work from so there was no completely accurate Fang seen from the reveal trailer/twitter art they posted in which I could make a true 1:1 sprite, but in the end that one neutral sprite of Fang became the basis for all the other sprites in terms of style and presentation.

All the other characters had to have sprites and designs based off whatever we could gather from the official art at the time and adapt them to sprite form, for Stella we had nothing but her sat back from the trailer and 1 front facing emoji from the KO_OP server. Trish’s ugly face had to be changed because her official spline model look didn’t work. Naser and Naomi were the first designs that I had to “work” to keep because this was still early on and there were talks of radically changing the fin across his face. so on. GVH’s designs aren’t very good, They’re weirdly proportionate bodies with cartoony not-anime heads with off putting snouts, wearing overly detailed clothing that no sane traditional animator would replicate for frames on end.

Despite all that, I chose not to change anything if I couldn’t help it, the core idea then was always in the end to show and say “I played the same game you did with YOUR designs, and I did better.”, be it for humiliating or out of an interest in seeing KO_OP improve GVH somehow.

Raymba’s Origin Story

This is mostly a fun anecdote during writing, that I think illustrates that spontaneity can be a tool for writing just as much as rigid planning and documentation is. The lead writer (Gacha Anon) and I were alone grinding away at the script one slow night when we got to the part where Fang and Anon meet a mysterious street vendor who would give them directions in exchange for their patronage. We had to stop and consider what would be funny enough to include, that would also be timeless and appropriately useless. I got the idea to check out the blog ‘the worst things for sale’ with Gacha Anon, and we considered using this or that until we reached the entry about a phone roomba which called out to us as the perfect candidate. Just as easy as that, we wrote the detail in and moved on.

Later in the story, we’d remember Anon has this new pet and wrote in that he made an enclosure for it, having found his new ‘pet’ so endearing he would feed it and gave it the name ‘metal gear RAYmba’. We would include it once more near the end of the story, acting as Anon’s little deliveryman when he’s giving Fang her new amber necklace.
Fast forward about half a year, we’re writing the bonus chapters for the full release of the game. We just wrapped up what we thought was the ‘final’ chapter, the final Naomi story. Earlier, we ended up including Raymba again as a pet that Anon had lent Fang before he left, and I started thinking on how this exchange itself would be interesting to witness. Raymba’s inclusion began as a joke, but he’d become a sort of witness to Anon and Fang’s whole relationship. I got the idea then to have one last final bonus chapter to serve as an epilogue to the story, with a final reveal at the end that the two had started a family together. We had the time, so I pitched the idea to the other writers, who loved it.

As I recall, writing Raymba’s Observations only took about twenty minutes. Granted, a lot of it is copy/pasted countdown dialogue (which I would not let fly now, seeing how annoying it is in action). After finishing it, I’d also got the idea to have it change the title screen to a new family photo as a final sendoff.

Making the Snoot Game Work

Here’s a statement from our lead programmer, Michael Yick, regarding his time with Snoot Game.

Snoot programming was latest in line for work due to the pipeline being:
writing -> drawing -> choreography/programming.

Most programming was just churning work since a lot of time was just spent in choreography land.

Ren’py, for its flaws, is a good engine and proves even a knuckle dragging retard can like make game if you pick it up; original programmer only knew Comp Sci 101 stuff from high school but made it work.

Free and Open Source was epic because of the contributions from fans: translations, choreography overhauls, and other kino that made the game better could be implemented. We did the same thing in Wani later to great results with fan localizations being implemented swiftly to the benefit of everyone.

Making the Snoot Game Sound

Similarly, here’s what our musician Melo Anon has to say about his time.

When the /TRASH/ thread was coming to end, I wanted to express my admiration for this game and community that all seemed to form over that one weekend in June. However I wasn’t an artist, and my writing wasn’t that good, so a song seemed like the best way of giving back. To my surprise, Song for Snoot was heard by the team, and they asked if I would work on a track for the new patch, this track being the full band cover of Amberlight Brilliance, which was featured in Ending D. This involved transcribing the original song to guitar and building the track around that, with the theme of a loud electric guitar ballad. This was also the first time I had to learn how to properly make a track loop, which would obviously come in handy for all my future work, and get frustrated with Discord’s file size limit.

Afterwards I wrote two tracks for the bonus Naomi chapter; Good Faith Leadup (or just Good Faith) and Good Faith (originally titled Tickets for July/Good Faith Reprise). These original compositions involved reading the script and getting a sense of the emotions between Fang, Anon, and Naomi, making sure the track truly reflected the tension and mood of the chapter. I had the idea of having different stems (The solo piano and synth/drum tracks) fade in and out according to certain parts in the scene, almost like musical strings in a film. Good Faith Reprise came from some experimentation based on the ending call between Fang and Anon, and ended up being the more popular track.

About a month later I was contacted again about doing some sound effects for a certain scene involving a long flight of stairs. This foley work involved dropping large books on the floor and going out at midnight to hit a bollard with a stick, which was all a joy to see put together. While my work on Snoot Game was brief, it ended up changing my life, and lead to me working on I Wani Hug That Gator and now Exit 665.

Our lead musician during the Snoot Game days made the OST using free loops for a program called mixcraft to make tracks that would fit the ‘summertime vibe’ we wanted the game to have.

Shifting Release Dates

We recognized early on that unless we held ourselves to a release schedule, we would fizzle out and lose motivation. The first deadline we picked was going to be in September, only thee months away. As the scope of the game increased, we decided instead the deadline should be ‘before GVH releases’. The issue was, all information about the release date was vague. At first all we had to go off of was ‘not this year’, so we started aiming for a Jan 1, 2021 release date. As that date passed, we got a hint: q2 2021 (rather, *not* q1), sometime before summer. We eventually released the game on June 4, 2021. It would take GVH another year to release.

Things We’d Do Differently

Since Snoot Game and our more recent project I Wani Hug That Gator, we’ve gotten a lot more experience and resources for making these games. It’s natural that we could outdo ourselves if we were to ‘do snoot again’ (personally, I re-read snoot game and find many things that I would not let fly now), although that moreso answers the question of what we would do with snoot now, rather than what we would do differently if we could turn back the clock to its’ development days.

-Significantly improve asset organization so programmers and artists have an easier time knowing what needs doing.
-Improve side characters’ inclusions a little more, i.e. Stella and Naser appearing in ending 4.
-Include Kanyesaurus as a character in ending 4.
-Undo Spears quitting his job, this decision was very out-of-character for him.
-Write the conflict with Fang with a lot more precision. Doing more research into the gender special stuff to get it more accurate while keeping the same messaging. Having better defined and revealed character motivations for why Fang got into it would have helped people sympathize and understand more when it hurts her.
-Get trump to tweet about it.

Thank you for reading along this far. For us devs, going down memory lane like this a bit is a good bit of entertainment, and hopefully you think so, too. What do you think? Patron users can comment their thoughts below.