Hi hi, happy new year! With such an eventful year being left behind, today I'd like to look back to everything that happened in 2022. Usually I would recap the last 3 months of development, but with many people getting to know of Fech just recently, I figured it would make sense to write a complete overview of the work on Fech The Ferret in 2022, starting from the buildup to the original alpha release up to the work on the upcoming 0.8a major update.

January

Introducing dev streams

Beginning of a new year, time for new habits! At the start of 2022, as we were ramping up the work in anticipation of the first public alpha of the game, we figured that we needed a way to keep people updated on what we were doing on the game. Making monthly devlogs - let alone videos - was out of the question due to the amount of time that would have taken; so that's how Wishdream - the prop artist on the team - and I Raoul, the director - decided to commit to monthly streams instead: we would spend a couple of hours showcasing something novel about the game by playing new builds or modeling props live as we chatted about the game.
This idea came from the fact Wishdream already had quite an active Twitch channel where they would play games and occasionally stream 3D modeling, sometimes of Fech as well! So why not build off of that instead of creating a new account? The first stream was on January 23rd, exactly 30 days before the Alpha release of Fech. We played the - at the time - most up to date internal build as we answered some questions live.

Experimenting with new tools

Right around the start of this month Wishdream also began to experiment with a new Blender tool: Geometry Nodes. This made it possible to assemble/shape models through a set of instructions. In our case we first tested it by making the wooden suspensions for the the quarry zone.
Over time working with geometry nodes fundamentally changed our approach to creating more advanced assets as it enables a modular approach to building and placing them. The prospect of making city buildings was no longer a daunting one.

February

Rushing to the finish line

This month was quite the hectic one. The artistic side of the team - Wishdream and Dramis, the concept artist - found themselves with a big task to deal with: making what would later become the Rat Hub, a small city for the rats living in the quarry, as well as building the Kyuknos, the introductory level of the game. Individually they seemed to be fairly simple, but the amount of unique assets and the time pressure proved to be very taxing for a team of 2.
One of the original pieces of concept art for the rat hub

Introducing the comic strips?

While Wishdream was working on the last few assets before the Alpha release, Dramis was busy with an unusual task: making comic strips, one of the longtime plans for Fech The Ferret. The idea is simple: given the generally fast-paced gameplay, it's hard if not counter-intuitive to constrain much of the game to cutscenes to tell about game events, so I once thought to rather use 4-panels comic strips to tell anecdotal stories from Fech's adventure. Now, this eventually worked, we have a few comic strips and I love them, but I never managed to include them inside of the game due to lack of planning on how to handle the UI and - more simply - just having other matters taking a higher priority. Possibly you'll enjoy them as collectibles in the near future!
One of the comic strips

Alpha Release!!

On February 22nd 2022 at 22.22.22 CET Fech The Ferret (0.5.0 alpha) releases on Itch.io with 3 zones, 3 rhythm aras, an introductory level and a tutorial stage. After years of build up, this was with no doubt the biggest milestone for the team to date. At the same time, I must admit that at this point releasing the alpha on this date was part keeping an old promise I made to myself and part a shift to move away from using Patreon as a way to grant access to alpha builds of the game.
This was quite a relieving event: as the project leader, I had finally taken a weight off my chest now that I no longer had to tell people to wait for new DEMOs in order to play and see what was getting added in Fech. As a small aside, you can catch the February stream VOD down here and have a glimpse at the beautifully disastrous Alpha launch we had. It was later followed by a week filled with hotfixes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkCw5ruvq5Q

Official schedule

Starting with the Alpha release we decided to publish a roadmap to better communicate development plans at a glance. The original plan (see below) was to release a new zone every 3 months. We later realized that fundamental gameplay loop changes and polish passes were needed first.
With no doubt updating our roadmap over time proved to be an effective way to tell players what was going to happen in the next few months without having to write impossibly long blogposts like- ... Did you know the ingame roadmap is fetched from a GitHub repository of the game website? That makes sure I can update it in there at any given time.

Fech The Brush

Last but not least on the matters of things tied to the alpha release: Dramis made a free Clip Studio brush! Get it here!

March

The initial online tests

This month saw a much needed slow down after two months of climax. Now, while everything about development appeared to be static on the surface, I decided to branch off and work on something brand new, I began to experiment with online features. First inspired back in late 2020, the aftermath of the alpha release felt like the perfect time to have a second try at syncing up several ferrets in a single world without having to change the base structure of the game. Fortunately, that happened to be the case!
Mildly interesting fact: one of these early only test sessions happens to be the origin of the discord emote saying "FECH". It involves player looking towards the camera and another player clipping through it.

April

Zone partitioning

April was a month largely focused on optimization. As you all know the game is made up of a single world with different zones. This is especially true on the technical side of things: the project is structured in multiple scenes with most of them representing a zone/level and all of their assets and logic. With this setup in mind, it made sense to manage performance optimization by having the game load/unload zones based on Fech's position in the world. On paper this seems to be an effective way to save up on resources, but this system had three big limitations: 1. My implementation relied on a portal-based approach. Throughout the game there would be 3 kinds of zone portals that dealt with assets: "preload", "load" and "unload"; going trough them would trigger different behaviours, for instance "preload" would warm up a zone to be loaded, while "load" would activate said zone. In order to have the game run properly, every portal must be triggered orderly, otherwise the game could stutter severely as it tried to instantly load a zone that wasn't ready yet, or worse it could leave a preloaded zone hanging forever causing the game to eventually freeze if the player attempted to load any other zone. 2. Each time a player went through a portal, they'd immediately get a performance hiccup, later followed by a permanent increase or decrease in performance based on whether the total amount of objects had increased or decreased. Only the "music change" portal made an exception to this rule since it doesn't directly deal with objects. 3. During most of the game 2 full zones alongside all of their objects would be active and loaded up in memory. An example of such situation is the entirety of the quarry being loaded while close to the end of the Ferrest; or the river zone - including its sewers - being loaded while being in the rat hub of the quarry. While better than having the entire game loaded at all times, this was still a waste of resources that couldn't be overlooked. Solving or mitigating all three issues required a full remake of the custom occlusion system of the open world. During this time, I began working on a system that would address these issues by subdividing zones into few "parts" encapsulated in bounding boxes with each of them representing easily identifiable sections of the world.
Top-down view of a few of the "bounding boxes" of the Ferrest. Good luck with understanding it! Now once empty zones got loaded in memory - what gets enabled/disabled is these new zone parts based on whether Fech is inside or outside of the bounding boxes. There's no specific preload/load mechanism anymore, but rather the scheduled activation of objects in succession: doing so takes longer than activating a whole scene as soon as possible, but it also assures that no visible hiccup is going to happen while zone parts are getting enabled/disabled. So, in reality the core scene loading system is still present, the system still relies on opening scenes that contain zones, but that's performed only once per zone as they no longer get unloaded. That certainly leads to an increased memory consumption, but that's a resource Fech hardly uses at all, as all tests seem to suggest the game struggles to ever use more than 1 GB of RAM. Potentially, keeping all assets of the game in memory should not present any issues; rather, the upside is a stark reduction in the frequency of performance hiccups caused by loading/unloading entire game scenes. All in all, this resulted in a massive CPU performance boost, making the game less CPU-bound.

May

Pause

Aside from the last update on the 0.5.Xa cycle on May 1st - which mostly saw CPU performance improvements - much of this month was uneventful, I was busy on a trip to Germany right in the middle of May.

Level design planning

Rather, on this month Gabriel - the level designer - began to change his workflow in Blender to be more effective at iterating on zones. He started to make use of procedural tools to work on the river zone and - after I came back from my trip - we began to plan the centre of Marmocle, the heart of the incoming fourth zone of the game. Around this time Gabriel also modeled the first sections of the 5th zone of the game.
Fuzzy rocks and modular buildings test

Save & Sound preparation

The very last days of the month were spent shooting the footage for the Save & Sound Steam Festival, a neat event where I got to explain the audio side of things in Fech. I went a little overboard with it as decided to try out a semi-professional setup with my camera: it was a pain due to the high temperatures overheating the camera and me getting 9 out of 10 takes wrong, but still a worthwhile experience.
Camera connected to PC via USB. High quality at a standard resolution

June

Steam Next Fest!

Time for another milestone! Showing Fech to the broad gaming audience at the Steam Next Fest. For this new demo we had to play it safe: re-use the same structure of older demos (brief intro + the first zone and a half) and get as much of the new visuals done on time. We could not afford unexpected bugs here.
This tactic seemed to work, we were able to meet our own deadlines without any crunch. Everything went smoothly save for one thing: we had not made any builds of Fech with the current Unity version. Now, Fech The Ferret is a big project, one that's had its incept in 2016; in order to keep up with the tech, we decided to update the Unity engine once a year. It's something that requires a lot of checks, so we such updates at a calm time of development after the release of a new LTS version of the program, usually around spring. It just so happens that right after the release of 0.5.2a, at the start of May, we updated to the newer Unity version, but neither Gabriel nor I remembered about doing that after the most recent build due to the two events nearly overlapping.
With and without the shadows bug A last-minute visual bug ensued, shadows would render pitch black instead of colourful like they usually do. Everything else worked as expected - fortunately - but this bug forced me to delay the new proper demo by half a day as I rushed to figure out what was going on. Hopefully as few people as possible realized that.

A brand new grass system!

People in here might not be aware yet, but I love working on grass. It's a recurring joke that every year I must remake it at least once. Well, June was the time for it, I began building a fully procedural grass system where every single grass blade gets created vertex by vertex using few simple meshes as primers.
A row of grass This would make it possible to build gigantic grass fields that are made of a single mesh with up to a million triangles. Is that bad? Not by modern standards! Modern GPUs can handle high polycount with ease: the goal was to rather free up the CPU by having it deal with as few objects as possible. Now, there's definitely room for improvements: the usage of a chunking system would make sure to occlude parts of the field that are not in view, but now I can at least say that grass rendering is no longer the one piece of tech bringing down the performance of the game.
The new grass accurately samples terrain data now!

July

More events

Just like June, July was also a busy month when it came showing Fech around: Save & Sound happened and I got to take part to First Playable, a yearly game business event located in Italy. Both events were useful to better understand what resonates the most with new players as well as publishers.

Fech notes

Around this time, I realized the importance of objectives and being able to keep track of progress. That was long overdue, so we quickly decided to include an ingame menu where the player would be able to read about essential info like goals and inventory.
Though to this date these Fech notes are only a little more than a proof of concept. We do plan to expand on them during 2023. Perhaps the new home to Fechs comic strips?

Grass showcase

Towards the end of the month I was able to complete the work I had previously begun on the grass. Now I could effectively test what was the typical polycount of a grass field if we decided to have only a single mesh per each zone part. That surprisingly turned out to be viable, here's a screenshot of the final section of the ferrest, right up to the obelisk.
End of Ferrest. 657k tris. I have scared fellow devs with this image

New terrains

Right as we were dealing with grass we finally committed to redoing the whole terrain system to be mesh-based rather than heightmap-based as Unity provides it. Or rather, I should say I finally gave in to Gabriel's requests and accepted that this change could no longer be delayed. In fact, before this time I had rather - for instance - developed a mesh-to-terrain conversion tool back in 2021, but for multiple reasons the open world structure of Fech simply couldn't support that solution, Unity terrains were a major limit to how we could approach level design.
Anyway, at this time we redid terrains for the Ferrest and the quarry and took the chance to fix many small issues they contained. The river zone would follow suit in September, right ahead of the Early Access release.

August

Preparations for SAGE 2022

The recurring theme throughout August is one: getting ready for the Sonic Amateur Games Expo. Happening in the first week of September, its a yearly online exhibition/celebration of games and fangames made by the Sonic community. My gamedev roots and much of my online activity is centered around those spaces, to the point of meeting some colleagues in there. So of course, I had to show Fech - a Sonic-inspired 3D platformer - at SAGE. And that's actually something I've been doing each year since 2019! It used to be a major way for me to get feedback earlier in development. 2022, though, was planned to be the last showcase, so I wanted to make sure to have ready something brand new and focus on the online.

Birth of the rat hub

It's at this point that the rat hub truly came to be. We needed a new hub to base the latest demo on, something that would play out a little like a sandbox where people could gather enjoy online play the best. To do that, Gabriel began working on new a new gimmick for this part - the zipline - while Dramis and Wishdream would make new landmarks for it.
Ziplines

Cat joins the team!

During this time we welcomed Cat, the new concept artist. Over the course of this year, it became apparent that the project was oversized for a single 2D artist, so Dramis was joined by another fellow Italian artist. Their styles are similar enough that it becomes almost impossible to tell apart which assets were designed by Dramis and which by Cat. Cats first assignments were to work on the brand new Power Plant level, something she managed to do masterfully right on time for the SAGE demo.
The treadmill she designed

More online tests

Aside from finally delivering a rhythm ara with the most beloved track track of the game, I spent most of my demo efforts working on the online mode. The goal was simple on paper: having the game to be online by default and getting support for the largest reasonable amount of people on a single room. That took a few tests, but it appeared that 12 people from all around the world performing as many actions as possible while standing close to each other was roughly the cap for a stable connection.
Taking turns at the zipline Small aside: you may see different colour palettes on the SAGE trailer. That ended up getting scrapped at the time. Ingame customization is still on the plate, but as something more nuanced than just changing colours.

September

SAGE 2022

SAGE time! A full week a playing games and seeing people play Fech. A few bugs popped up, but nothing out of the ordinary. Overall a fun week for the team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrUp7AWKcwA Fech's teaser at 5:39

Leading up to Early Access!

The Early Access release date was set to just two weeks after the end of SAGE. We had to act fast, we had barely enough time to fix new bugs and perform a couple of major changes. Some of the things that were made during these days were: a brand new cutscene introducing to Fech's adventure; a new dirt texture from scratch, old one looked dull and ugly; improvements to the looks of the river zone; a reliable water stream system to make the river push Fech back; compacting the game world by cutting down on entire buffer sections present in the quarry and by rotating the entire ferrest zone by 45, risky but it fortunately paid off.
Ferrest rotated

Release Time!!

It's September 21st 2022, after 6 years and 3 months Fech The Ferret finally sees the light of day on Steam. It's the alpha, it's still Early Access, but nonetheless a huge accomplishment for us working in Aucritas. This time I managed to make and test the build of game with a few hours of advance so we could properly celebrate on stream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUVpo-tiGGA

October

New optimizations

Time to immediately go back to work! Up until this point 2022 had been extremely taxing on myself: somehow my Uni exams lined up with all of the major milestones: mid February - itch alpha, late June - Next Fest, mid September - Early Access; so now that University was taking its one month of full break - and I was freed from most of PR work that led up to release - I was finally able to relax by working on something novel instead of rushing to meet self-imposed deadlines. And that's how I picked optimization again, a good excuse to clean up the project and identify bottlenecks on low spec hardware. This is when we found out we had gone far overboard with polycount on river canes (up to 15M tris on display!), and I also figured out I could reduce grass density by up to 30% without apparent visual changes.

Improvements to the river

We added new raindrops! This time procedurally done in shader instead of using particles. Waves were improved too, the aforementioned canes optimized and adjusted, and lastly new bridges were made.
During this month we also resumed planning for the city of Marmocle as well as began defining two new hubs that would surround the river zone.

November

Rhythm ara improvements

On this month I worked on improving rhythm aras. Nothing too flashy: fixing obscure bugs, updating old textures and adding the long-requested pause menu.

Misc visual work

As usual, November saw some changes in the game visuals. This time we focused on the beginning of the ferrest by adding structures that better contextualize the place and by developing a new texturing approach to break away from the repetitive checkered pattern of the rocks. Really convenient to better establish a texturing style.
Before and after

December

More terrain improvements

Now this is one of those things that bothered me specifically. The whole game's style is about striking lines and colours, and terrains defied that rule: the blending between grass and dirt was unnaturally soft. So, I put a fix to that with a rather crafty system that makes use of two noise layers and a lot of shader calculations.
Before, WIP and after A side effect of muddying the input texture with noise is that we can now lower the splatmap resolution by 16 times - from 2048px to 512px - with no visual degradation. That's going to save quite some storage space.

Goose hub

The main topic of the month has been working on the new hub placed right before the start of the river zone. You'll get to meet some mischievous animals who seem to be eager to play games with you.
Honk

Resumed work on the online

Lastly! I went back to working on the online mode with the goal to add a small online game. It's a game of tag: easy to design on paper, but fairly complicated to organize in-game without having traditional lobbies or menus. You'll get to play it in the upcoming update!

End of the racap

And now we're left to work on version 0.8.0a of Fech, due in a couple of weeks from now. Thank you all who managed to get to the end of this post! It took me a full week to track down and review every month of 2022. I hope you enjoyed getting a glimpse of how a year of development can look like. Due to the structure of this post I was forced to cut a lot of stuff, I especially had to avoid talking about incremental upgrades, individual features (like the ability to dook ingame) or posting screenshots of the game as it began to look nicer; though in roughly 3 months from now you'll get to see another recap, a quarterly one, one that will rather neatly sum up the next three months of events surrounding Fech The Ferret. Or perhaps you wish to get updated as soon as possible? Check out the official discord server then, I use the fech-dev channel to show things early in a less formal manner.
See you next time! Raoul.

[ 2023-01-09 23:52:44 CET ] [ Original post ]