Dev stream happening today!
Finishing up Porfu's place this time around.
We start at 16:00 UTC, July 27th
twitch.tv/wishdream
You can also watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page while it's live!
Fech the Ferret
Color the world! - Fech The Ferret Dev Stream 31
Dev stream happening today!
Finishing up Porfu's place this time around.
twitch.tv/wishdream
You can also watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page while it's live!
Grass or plants? - Fech The Ferret Dev Stream 30
Today we're having a development stream!
We're finishing the same place of last time.
We start at 16:00 UTC, June 30th
twitch.tv/wishdream
You can also watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page while it's live!
More grains or more gains - Fech The Ferret Dev Stream 29
Today we're having another development stream, this time live from Wish's own place!
We're dealing with a new place! One for a new character as well.
We start at 14:00 UTC, May 29th
twitch.tv/wishdream
You can also watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page while it's live!
It's Porfu's lab, there better not be a crab! - Fech The Ferret Dev Stream 28
Today we're having another development stream, this time live from Wish's own place!
We're modeling a new room inside Marmocle.
We start at 07:00 UTC, April 20th
twitch.tv/wishdream
As usual you're also able to watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page.
Oh no, help me, I am under the water - Fech The Ferret Dev Stream 27
Today we're having a development stream, we're modeling Porfu's shop!
We start at 15:00 UTC, March 2oth
twitch.tv/wishdream
As usual you're also able to watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page.
Update
Stream ended! We ended up having a MUCH longer stream than anticipated as we went semi-off topic a lot.
Check the VOD here!
Mustache, whose stash? - Fech The Ferret Dev Stream 26
Today we're having a development stream, we're modeling Porfu's shop!
We start at 17:00 UTC, February 24th
twitch.tv/wishdream
As usual you're also able to watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page.
Update
Stream ended! Everything went fine except Raoul got to be pixellated but with excellent audio for most of the time.
Check the VOD here!
Does a noodle enjoy noodles? - Fech The Ferret Dev Stream 25
Today we're having a development stream, prop modeling as usual!
We start at 15:00 UTC, January 16th
twitch.tv/wishdream
As usual you're also able to watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page.
Update
Stream ended! It was a quite chaotic one, riddled with technical difficulties on Raoul's end.
Here's a link to the VOD for those who missed the stream.
1.1.0b Devlog - Swimming, new clothes and countless bugfixes
This update started as a minor one, an update where I would work largely alone to address the most recent bugs with things like climbing steps and wall climbing.
Though - as you can guess from the length of the devlog - for a wide variety of reasons the scope of the update ended up growing, starting from implementing some new animations for Fech - the swimming ones and the dash landing - and closing with revamped UI for the rhythm aras and Porfu's shop.
In the meantime I also took the time to learn a few new tricks in the matters of optimization, so do tell if performance changes significantly or anything looks off!
HIGHLIGHTS:
2023-12-27 Added two new clothes sets
2023-12-30 Revamped swimming gameplay to be fun and more expressive thanks to new animations, better camera and better controls
2023-12-30 Added Anxious Rat at the start of the quarry
2024-01-07 Remade the UI for rhythm aras
CHANGES:
-Fech climbs steps smoothly now
-Improvements to zone part loading
-Added LOD to some smaller objects
-Powie's model was polished a tad
-Slightly increased spawn distance for leaves
-Removed roadmap from the main menu. It's no longer needed
-Updated game logo on Steam
-Shortened dialogue on the power plant
-Added wall texture to Marmocle
-Increased the ability to look up by 75%, you can now easily see the full extent of the obelisk in the ferrest!
-Patched an out of bounds spot in the ferrest
-Added few useful items in the river zone
-Optimized occlusion on the river zone
-Shuffled some options in the settings menu
-Remade the resolution dropdown to be a simpler and nicer-looking selector instead
-Renamed "misc quality" to "general quality" and added a new "low" option that's more effective at saving GPU performance by halving texture resolutions
-It's now possible to look up and down using mouse controls
-Small tweaks to how camera moves
-Re-added face blinking and dooking animation to Fech
-Added mipmapping to most of textures. Might improve performance on low spec machines and reduce a bit the intentionally aliased look of the game
-Compressed some assets to better contain the slowly but surely growing filesize of the game
-Reduced delay in jump sfx
-Added sfx to the dream tutorial
-Tweaked "so far", the dream tutorial song, to be a tiny bit more balanced and polished
-Framerate cap is now off by default, this means better visuals by default on powerful PCs with high refresh monitors
-Small tweaks to some icons
-Rolling feels a little more powerful now
-Added a clean soft camera shot transition when getting into water
-Tiny tweaks to dash camera
-Fech defaults to dash motion underwater now, you can't fully stop moving
-Added character portrait to ATM
-Tweaked dialogue typewriter speed
-Tiny tweaks to dialogue and text
-Fech nicely adapts to the underwater floor now
-Brought back the mechanic of jumping out of water, now more polished than before
-The game cursor is now a little hand
-Added rain effect to river ground
-Added a new Porfu shop to Marmocle, it sells only the most prestigious items
-It's easier to snap out of a chained pole by allowing to jump sideways like on normal individual poles
-Timer countdown is now synced to the beat
-A few improvements to make the power plant sync better with the music
-A deleted save file can now be recovered in the save folder
-More emphasis on birds in the tutorial
-Added a new wall sliding animation
-Due to player confusion, the puzzle tutorial is now entirely optional
-Camera adapts more slowly to the ground slope resulting in a more smooth and gentle motion
-Camera is now a little closer to Fech in rhythm aras
-Changed occlusion culling settings to be more granular now that CPU is no longer the main bottleneck
-Increased max speed underwater, decreased water edge speed
-Updated game icon on the OS
FIXES:
-Fixed Rhythm aras not supporting re-tries after having failed once
-Fixed Rhythm ara death planes triggering too easily
-Fixed step offset issues. Fech gets stuck at random steps much more rarely
-Camera now ignores a few troublesome colliders in the tutorial
-Fixed an editor bug that led to clothes slipping into a build
-Fixed excessive underwater effect on a few puddles
-Small tweaks to aid navigation at the start of the ferrest and in the middle of the quarry
-Fixed a music triggering bug in the sewers
-Closed hole in ferrest trees
-Correctly implemented wall climbing on trees
-Fixed respawn bug that could lead Fech to falling through the ground
-Fixed small bug that would show the network connect button as interactable if connected to the default room
-The game can correctly go full screen on a secondary monitor now
-Fixed wrong bunny colours showing up on dialogues in Marmocle
-Removed some temporary towers from Marmocle
-Fixed parts of Marmocle unintentionally appearing in the sewers
-Fixed bug that would allow to terminate minigames and Porfu's shop while starting them
-Fixed devil outfit set not having any slots assigned (and thus not showing up in UI)
-Added back decals in the quarry zone
-Fixed gravity bug when running down slopes
-Fech's shader correctly supports shadow cascades now, which means meaning you can safely set shadow settings to high and enjoy better graphics
-Fixed the buggy and unintended ability to jump up walls. Now wall jumping is strictly horizontal
-Restored Fech's animations stopping when pausing during a rhythm ara
-Removed all references to the old Fech model
-Fixed plank spring bug that would get Fech frozen in place
-Fixed bug that would allow to swim even after leaving the water
-Removed old "end of build" dialogues from the park
-Fixed small but annoying bugs with saving menu settings
-Fixed bug that would lead to Fech's body clipping through clothes when swapping an already occupied slot
-Greatly increased the consistency in speed and view you get when beginning to swim
-Fixed a longstanding bug where grass would permanently desaturate after dooking once
-Fixed ancient annoying bug that would have Fech act as if the dash button was constantly pressed
-Fech only adapts to the ground slope if in quadruped pose now. No more funky biped rotations when hitting a pebble, sorry!
-Fixed some stuff that would make the end of the landslide setpiece immersion-breaking
-Fixed major bug that would have cutscene respawn positions impossible to override, leading to Fech always respawning back in the same locations
-Small fixes in the power plant
-Reduced the impact of a climbing animation bug
-Fixed Power Plant music not repeating
-Fixed bug with spring launcher in the Power Plant
-Small improvements to snapping to poles
-Removed the unintended ability to climb the invisible wall at the ara exit
-Added back small visual elements of rhythm aras
-Fixed tiny visual bug when loading rhythm aras
-Slightly smoother and more polished behaviour on ara pins
-Fixed known issues with dialogue
-Fixed major bug with colliding against crane blocks
-Negligible polishing on the entrance to the power plant
-Fixed speed lines getting spammed in the rhythm ara
-Fixed bug that would have the pause menu appear if the game goes out of focus while playing a rhythm ara as it does not stop Fech from moving forwards
KNOWN ISSUES:
-Small troubles with step offset
-Respawn position is sometimes unexpectedly offset
-Rhythm aras are a little empty and buggy
-Same old camera collision issues at the start of the ferrest
-Cloud saves don't work on Linux yet
-Marmocle is rather unoptimized
-Much of the music and sound effects are missing at the moment
-Some vfx and particles are missing
-Production quality of cutscenes and NPC interactions varies a lot at the moment
As a final note, I plan to take a roughly 2 months-long break from updating the game as I focus on getting my bachelor's degree in March.
Though we'll get to see each other rather soon! This month I'll make a lengthy post recapping 2023's development of Fech, and then we'll have the monthly stream alongside Wishdream.
Cheers!
Oh, and as usual, for more direct updates consider joining the discord community!
New clothes for the new year - Fech The Ferret Dev Stream 24
We're having a development stream!
This time it's about modeling clothes for the game.
We start at 15:30 UTC, December 27th
twitch.tv/wishdream
As usual you should also be able to watch the stream right here on this post and on Fech's Steam page!
1.0.0a Devlog - Systemic rework: physics, animation, dialogue, collectibles
With no doubt the bigger update the game ever had.
I'll try to be quick and sum up the intent behind this update.
As many of you know, I've been working on Fech for 7 years and a half now, the game has been a team effort since Spring 2020. Until a few months ago making Fech was a diligent process of taking two steps forward and one step back as we patched/edited/replaced stuff that wouldn't work with the growing complexity of the project.
In summer 2023 we got ourselves in a bit of a perfect storm: we realized that the old dialogue system was at odds with our worklow, that way too much code was running concurrentlly thus making interactibles nigh impossible to code and - on top of this all - a newly improved Fech 3D model was on its way to completion.
It was time for some project-wide restructuring, hopefully the basis to get on the path to completing the game.
So two new people joined the team!
Determined Bun as the new writer and Chaoko taking the role of 3D animator on the project.
We began remaking all NPC interactions to be much more flexible with a new dialogue system of our own, Fech's animations got remade from scratch for the new model and - lastly - I was finally convinced to port and rewrite ALL gameplay code to work using state machines.
Everything you'll read below is either outlining this process or describing the happy consequences of getting into this new approach to working, such as the introduction of cutscene, more minigames and much better collectibles.
And with that, I'll leave you to perhaps the longest devlog to date. Have fun reading!
HIGHLIGHTS:
2023-06-20 Entirely redone the dialogue system. It now supports character portraits, text animations and character animations
2023-07-28 Moved from Character Controller to Rigidbody for Fech's movements
2023-08-05 Redone Fech's physics system from scratch. Better grounding, rotations and handling. Fixed all issues tied to slopes and climbing. Improved overall feel providing a much smoother experience.
2023-08-09 Dive roll mechanic changed to feel more like a short boost after a brief pause in the air
2023-08-13 Redone camera height control to be much simpler and more reliable. Works while dashing too
2023-08-16 Redone the spine bending system to be more natural-looking (later changed again to be simpler)
2023-09-26 Look of the sewers has been polished and revamped
2023-09-28 Goose chase added
2023-10-28 Began transitioning to a State Machine system to handle Fech. Fixed countless bugs tied to interactibles
2023-10-28 The team is now complete! New writer and animator. Updated credits to reflect that
2023-11-07 Dialogues in the game have been overhauled. New HUD for NPCs has been added
2023-11-07 Massively cut down on Garbage Collection and removed periodic framerate spikes. The framerate should be a lot more stable!
2023-11-12 New Fech model with remade animations!
2023-11-14 New Quests and NPCs! Also, bunnies!
2023-11-16 Fech can wear clothes now! Go find them around the world!
2023-11-18 Added many new animations that allow gameplay to feel more expressive
2023-11-20 Porfu travels all around the world to sell his goods now!
2023-11-22 The old centre is good to go! If only there was a bridge to reach it...
2023-11-26 Redone the climbing system to closely mimic the base mechanics but with more animations and bigger wall variety support
2023-11-27 Marmocle's market is ready and it's got a few minigames to play!
2023-11-27 Added ferrest and quarry cutscenes to the game, look at that ferret go!
2023-11-28 Added Fech meeting Powie
2023-11-29 No longer alone, Powie sticks by Fech's side now
2023-11-30 Fech's notes have been remade for better navigability and a nicer display of clothes and comics
2023-11-30 Comics finally added to the game!
2023-12-05 Updated online code: clothes and better animation syncing!
2023-12-06 Removed pal pulling from the game entirely: we'll redo the mechanic at a later time
2023-12-07 Game now autosaves every time the player touches water. Easier to understand, opening the menu is no longer needed
CHANGES:
-Added idle animations to squids
-New shops in Marmocle
-Increased physics calculations as part of moving to a rigidbody system to handle Fech's physics
-Camera improvements, shots feel like they flow much more freely now
-Swimming is a little slippery now
-Slope movement now carries over when losing grounding. The player can theoretically launch themselves in the air if speed is sufficient
-Slightly re-balanced the roll: a little slower, lasts a little longer
-Slight increase to max swimming speed
-Added HUD animation for Fech taking damage
-Marginal improvements to the look of the credits tab
-Added a water splash effect
-Somewhat nicer water look
-More wind to grass in the river
-Changing the camera angle with the right stick now leads it to sticking into that position for some time
-Updated resolution scaling settings to provide more granular control
-Physics code is now computed 120 times per second instead of 30, the Physics simulatations happen instead always exactly once per frame. This might lead to a smoother experience and more consistent framerates without any significant CPU overhead
-Reduced code overhead of respawning Fech
-Optimized discord integration by updating it only when needed
-Significantly increased the size of input prompts
-Added a new zipline at the start of the quarry to backtrack more easily
-New structures in the ferrest and river zones, slightly improved the overall visibility
-Added subtle spine bending to Fech rolling
-Thumbstick camera controls are much faster now
-Quadruped walk camera is a little closer now
-Quadruped walk and dash camera shots are more similar, the blend more nicely between each other
-Dash camera is a tiny bit closer now. These camera edits aim to make the game a little more immersive
-Increased size of UI prompt
-Polished Zipline: faster, smoother and with a new camera shot
-Small tweaks to dashing to feel a little snappier
-Many small tweaks to gravity acceleration depending on Fech's state
-Added squash and stretch to rolling
-Dropping while rolling gives 50% more stamina now
-Added a waterslide at the end of the river
-Added dialogue and better interactions to the power plant
-Unexpected feature: thanks to the better climbing system, trees are now climbable
-Temporarily removed explosion from the quarry battery
-Marmocle has out of bound trees now
-Removed stripes from previously unclimbable walls. Now there's no longer any hard limit on what can be climbed
-Fech is much faster at turning when walking on all fours
-Tweaked the notification system to look a little more consistent with the overall style of the game
-Colours are little bit more vivid overall
-New save notice animation, it plays as soon as it happens, rendered on top of everything
-Save animation no longer shares the same space as the notifications
-Due to how the dialogue system works, the game saves very often now. Will be tweaked further in the future
-Added underwater distortion
-Significant optimization improvements in the quarry: sections now load and unload much more effectively thanks to proper partitioning of props and interactibles
-Removed ability to manually save progress in the menu, replaced with resetting Fech's position (as oppose to resetting the save file)
-Better rhythm ara camera: closer to Fech and with nicer vertical movement
-The ara gate has to be loaded only once. Restarting aras is less annoying now
-Restored a little bit of spine bending when using treadmills
-Much improved spine bending on online players. It now perfectly mimics the local behaviour
-Ziplines are much faster now
-Fech control sensitivity in rhythm aras are no longer dependent on the speed of the level
-Made the clothes and notes notice more apparent after Fech wakes up
-Adjusted ara tuuti to work without pal pulling
-Added a very basic implementation of wall jumping
-Improved the feel of ara pins
-Camera improvements when rolling
-Added a little dialogue at the start of the ferrest
-Removed roadmap from the menu
FIXES:
-Fixed bug that would have the player stuck in a climbing position if they climbed a wall right before entering a rhythm ara
-Fixed collision bug tied to interacting with triggers
-Removed demo barrier that was incorrectly left in the quarry
-Fixed lack of rotation when walking on slopes
-Accidentally fixed some gravity bug with the poles by remaking physics
-Fixed swimming bug that would lead to a small vertical force being applied even when standing outside of the water
-Fixed animation triggering when entering water
-Fixed other small issues with animation triggering such as jump animation not triggering at times
-Tiny adjustments in the second half of the ferrest, backtracking is now allowed
-Potentially big performance fix, many objects were rendering backfaces
-Fixed foliage slider not removing nearly as many trees as it was supposed to. Major performance improvement for integrated graphic cards
-Pollen boxes and out of bound tree trunks now correctly support fog
-Fixed more issues with triggering animations as part of rebuilding the Animator to use State Machines
-Debug characters have been removed from Marmocle
-Fixed all major bugs in the power plant
-Fixed all major bugs tied to poles
-Fixed a few bugs in the glasshouse at the end of the river zone
-No more jittery look on unclimbable stripes now that's they're removed
-As part of a UI overhaul, Fech notes are now navigable with a controller
-Mostly fixed falling through the ground bug when respawning out of an enclosed level
-Fixed most of water not triggering a save position or respawning in inconvenient places
-Fixed ara essential bug, now it's playable again
-Fixed main music bugs in rhythm ara
-Removed the unfinished defective online "business" code
-Online players now can correctly show up as sleeping if they join the network before starting to play
-Fixed and improved visibility on the quest/item notice
-It's no longer possible to pause on the treadmill section at the ara gate. This would lead to a situation where it's impossible to unpause
-Small UI transition fixes
-Fixed server region not showing up when auto-connecting to the network
-Fixed a few networking UI bugs related to allowing players to connect to a new region / room
-Fixed a bug with resetting Fech's position
KNOWN ISSUES:
-Same old camera collision issues tied to underpasses. Might be more of a design issue than else at this point
-Cloud saves don't work on Linux yet
-Fech himself oddly doesn't support shadow cascades. Set shadows to low
-Marmocle is likely to be very heavy on slower machines. This will be dealt with over time
-A lot of music and sound effects are missing at the moment
-Some vfx and particles are missing
-Rhythm aras are in need of a partial overhaul is expected in the future
-Production quality of cutscenes and NPC interactions varies a lot. These elements are still very much under development
Closing thoughts.
I decided to drop the update cards thing. They looked really nice, but I would usually end up completely missing the mark with assuming incoming priorities and actually deciding what to work on.
So this time around I'm just saying what my current intentions are for the next major update:
Partial rework of how rhythm aras. They need significant polish if not some major changes altogether.
Bringing back / completing missing gameplay features, so basically the pal pulling.
Delivering a new zone or level.
New features to the online play now that we have a state machine making everything easier to manage.
Anyway, congrats for reaching the end of the devlog!
As usualy I suggest joining the discord community for random updates and direct feedback.
playfe.ch/discord
Cheers!