Hello and welcome! It's time for a new update. I'm marking it as the start of the beta phase of the project now that 1.0alpha established the rules of the game in a definitive way.
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!