(2026-01-16) Feed Snivy News

With my recent Patreon shilling, I've had some new Patrons come to me asking for these elusive "Feed Snivy updates"! Oh right, those! I suppose I'm obliged to give them!

Well, I'm WORKING on it...but it's nothing finished yet. These things...they take time!

I've shown some WIPs so far of it and whatnot on the Discord, but for those who don't like using it, I suppose I should do them on my Patreon page!

How about this, halfway through the month, I'll give a little progress report, huh? Sounds like fun, alright? A little behind the scenes, some little teasings? Of course, when I have something to release, I'll release it, but in the interim you can have these little nuggets.

So what's next for Feed Snivy? You might've seen me talking about it on WeightGaming or elsewhere but the ambition is to retrofit it into an all-purpose character-feeding-engine, so to speak! And then to sort of update it continually, with new characters and other features! It'll be a trademark little game thing to enjoy on the side of my other works.

I'd like to begin this post with a little preface about the origins of the game. You can argue that the origins of "Feed Snivy"; this idea of dragging food to an idly-standing character, them eating it and growing larger technically has its origins in a sort of failed project I made about six years ago now...(how time flies!)

https://files.catbox.moe/cacou1.webm

That kind of went caput, due to the usual issues of scope creep, me not knowing much about programming or art or anything at all (what you see in that .webm is about what you get). I had to hardcode Susie's animations there in the game's programming! Not a good way to do it! But, sometimes you have to be stupid to learn what's right.

Fast forward to about four years ago. You might know that I'm a big fan of Binding of Isaac. I was working a mod for that game that was essentially a comprehensive visual overhaul for the game. This is no small task! This requires not only a tremendous volume of work, but in some cases, changing the game's animation files (and being able to preview changed graphics they would animate in game is quite useful).

Now, the game ships with an animation editor the developers of that game used during development. I got kind of acquainted with it. I used it for that Isaac project and a number of other things (almost every animation I've done up to recently is with it).

https://files.catbox.moe/8gbqhz.png

Is this smart way to animate things? I mean, if you're animating for Isaac, yeah, but not really for anything else.

Krita (my art program) also has an animation editor, and though it's much more professional, its skillset isn't wholly transferable to the editor I was using more often. You might've seen that image of Jolene from Paper Mario I did; that's the one thing I used Krita's animation editor for! Additionally, it seemed to...crash? Pretty often? That's FOSS for you!

But, as you can see, look at that animation editor I was using! Yucky! Ew! No dark mode! Jank as hell! Annoying, nonsensical error messages! No rebinds! It's a Windows-only program so I have to run it through Wine (i use arch btw) which adds an extra layer of cruft to it! Untold psychic damage! Sure, it might've worked well for the developers who were making the game, but to other people it's...certainly lacking.

So I decided...I would fix it! I wanted to train my nascent C++ skills and give something back to that Isaac modding community, alongside making something that I would be more comfortable with using; this is all in service to that Isaac mod (which I could argue is my true passion, but that doesn't really give you a career, does it?) but it could also be for other things.

...ultimately, this culminated in my own flavor of animation editor:

https://github.com/ShweetsStuff/anm2ed
https://files.catbox.moe/6g2i9y.png

...it certainly wasn't easy! I began work in the summer of 2025, and I had to essentially learn how to make user-facing, USEFUL software for the first time in my life. It was very very ugly. I'm entirely self-taught on programming so when actually being critiqued by (somewhat normal) people of all sorts of different set ups and needs it was an experience that certainly put me through the wringer.

This isn't some silly fetish game that only a dozen people would enjoy, who would probably be kinder to it having faults, this is a useful bit of software that could benefit hundreds, maybe a couple thousand of people! (Isaac is a hugely popular game and its modding scene is also rather huge). So if there's problems in it, it could affect and waste the time and work of tons of people! And sometimes, the problems could be invisible; some people might use it and never give me reports on their experience.

...I had to rewrite it about one or two times to get it...functional and half-decent. Even now, it's still far from perfect! And technically, still in development But, well, the result is...a somewhat more functional and feature-rich version of the previous animation editor. And I quite like using it!

...oh right, Feed Snivy. WELL. The origins of it was ALSO me trying to test the editor and making sure it was up to snuff being used in an actual project. For a programming project like it, working on the thing itself and then actually using that thing in a productive capacity are certainly things you need to test. It's all in service to that Isaac mod, which I am getting back to...EVENTUALLY.

And yeah, why Snivy? Because I like Snivy, and it's easy to animate. I started work on what would become Feed Snivy in mid-November of 2025, had to take some breaks to work on art or the animation editor (and real life stuff, etc. etc.), but yeah, eventually it did release!

And the feedback was outstanding! I mean, I really should've expected it in a way. I had other games and while some people were big fans the reception for them did seem generally lukewarm; I can chalk it up to the character already being something established and beloved, but it seems like it being a Pokemon thing wasn't just what was good about it.

And of course, people have appetites. If you give them something, they want MORE. I was initially resigned about it, having just worked my butt off on it to get something out before the end of the year. I turned people down right off the bat. "Updates? Isn't it good enough? Doesn't the Snivy talk a lot and get fat enough?" Nope! Never enough!

And of course, some people swayed me with money, wanting that Snivy to get bigger...I suppose that's when I saw opportunity strike (as greedy as it may seem, lol). A couple years ago, when someone was talking to me about Frillrun (another game I did), someone told me that I should go in more on game development! Truth be told, I did agree!

Now, I know I like doing art...(and that's certainly not stopping, any time soon). But the issue with it is that people look at it for a very fleeting amount of time. With games, you can really push things a lot further, and explore concepts more. Making games is something I really wanted to do! But it takes a lot of effort to make games, versus a bit of art, which I usually do one thing a day, and the Algorithm(TM) demands constant releases. It's all about that rat race...

...so, with Feed Snivy, about that time, I was thinking, "hey, maybe I could make this into something of a much bigger game, to supplement my art." Wait, didn't I say that already? I'm rambling. I think you can probably get what I mean by now.

ANYWAYS. UPDATES.

What I'm working on now is trying to make Feed Snivy into this all-encompassing feeding-character engine! With support for characters not just made by me, but by anyone!

Feed Snivy originally, given its very limited scope, was a very hardcoded sort of game. What I've been working on is to remove all of this hardcoded-ness and separate it out for future characters.

All the variables associated with a character should be part of some format that the game can load in and process; numbers, graphics, sounds, etc. Each character should be its own bespoke, customisable experience, essentially.

These things are determined by .xml files (why XML and not JSON, etc.? Because the animation format's XML and I can't change that!) that you type in things and you put your character files all in and it works and is GOOD. It wouldn't just be character traits, but items, dialogue, backgrounds, etc.

https://files.catbox.moe/0ugbbl.png

All the files you'd have would be put into a big .zip file and the idea is that you'd drag that big dumb character file and you dump it in the game's characters folder, and be able to load whatever kind of crazy feeding experience it has.

And because I have to move past this hardcoded-ness and introduce customizability I have to move the game beyond a simple fixed web experience into a whole desktop application! Scalable resolutions! Panning and zooming around, in case a character's fat ass can't fit into frame! A character selection menu! And of course, saving your current progress!

There's a lot of stuff I've worked on so far that probably nobody would care about but is ultimately necessary to satisfying my vision. I could talk about it, but this post is long enough as is...

So, right now I'm in the brunt of it. But it's getting where I need it to be for the next release and quickly. My goal right now is essentially just to take the original Feed Snivy experience it, adapt it into this format, polish up all the little issues and quirks it had, update the engine to support everything I'd need for the future, and expand it with more stages, for a fresh new experience.

One I do that, it gets a LOT easier. I 100% want to do more characters. Some familiar faces that appear in my galleries, definitely (and not just Pokemon!). Definitely completing that old six-year-long promise I never fulfilled. And, of course...if people want to commission me characters to do, or want to make their own characters, I do fully intend to support that, with guides and whatnot. I'd also want to expand the game itself, with new features and the like...still thinking about how exactly I'm gonna do that.

You'll see it all in time! Be patient! I will say I'm hoping to get something out by the end of this month, maybe next month (although there is a little game coming out then called Mewgenics which may take up a lot of my time, lol.)

Thanks for sticking around!