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!

[ 2024-01-09 23:55:03 CET ] [ Original post ]