Fech The Ferret recap - Q1 2022

Hi hi! Welcome to the first quarterly recap of 2022! This semester I've been quite busy with development and university, so why not write it instead at the very start of the third quarter? With that said, get ready for this retrospective (?) as it's a reasonably packed one!

On February 22nd 2022 at 22:22:22 CET Fech The Ferret (0.5.0 alpha) released on Itch.io! After years of build up this is with no doubt the biggest milestone to date. Though I must admit that at this point releasing the alpha on this date was more of keeping an old promise I made to myself granted that the Steam Early Access has been delayed to this summer.

In any case, after a pretty significant team-wide rush to get things done in time, I feel quite relieved to finally have this weight off my chest as we no longer have to tell people to wait for new DEMOs in order to play and see what's getting added with each update. Have fun playing the first 3 zones of Fech The Ferret! (more zones coming later in 2022 and 2023).

With the early release of the game coming up we quickly reazlied we needed an effective way to communicate what was going to happen in the next months, we needed something that could be read at a glance. So the plan began with to organize development in such way to have four major updates a year -  a pacing that loosely mimics the quarterly recaps - so that it would be easy to represent with a "card" per each major update, just like you can see in the picture above.

Now that the proper game is easily accessible, giving access to builds through Patreon begins to be somewhat redundant. For this reason this page will soon begin to change! I'll perhaps tone it a bit down now that there's largely no need to gatekeep builds. Time will tell.

The start of the new year also marks the beginning of monthly dev streams! This too picked as a way to better communicate what's going on, Wishdream and I have decided to stream every month for a couple of hours: in this time we usually have Wish model new props or one of us showcase game updates live as we discuss about development and other casual matters.

Here you can have a look at the beautifully disastrous Alpha launch from the February stream, or you can check out all the VODs in this playlist on youtube. While if you wish to catch them live you can get notified on the Fech discord server.

Speaking of more technical aspects, one of the most notable production changes in the past few months has been being able to rely more and more on Blender as it recently introduced Geometry Nodes. It's essentially a new tool to assemble/shape models through a set of instructions. In our case we first tested it with making the wooden suspensions for Cava Rattina. We can't wait to use this approach to decorations in more scenarios.

Nothing much to explain in here, I wanted to show some of the newly made models. As usual Wish did an amazing job with turning Dramis's drawings in 3D.

One of the things that's happened during the lead-up to the alpha release is an increased focus on developing Fech's storytelling. Due to the free and high speed nature of the game this has always been a dodgy topic, so Mando - our writer - ended up focusing on individual characters through optional dialogue; a perfect example of this is the rats you might have met in the the Itch release.

Last but not least, Fech The Brush is here! In celebration of the Itch release, Dramis made a free Clip Studio brush, get it! 

And just like all past recaps, we can begin to close this lengthy post with some lovely Fech (and Tracy) art! I find it fascinating how the final selection always ends up to be so varied in style despite depicting the same (set of) character(s).

And so with the Itch release we're slowly reaching a new phase of development of Fech. One where more and more people in the community have actually spent on the game and where my promises start weight more. 

It might sound trivial, but after nearly 6 years of working on Fech it's really bizarre to see people pay for what used to be a personal project backed by no proper business plan. During this whole time the project reasonably evolved into a commercial game, the build up towards this has been roughly 3 years long, but the switch from releasing free content to actually selling a (digital) package doesn't feel any less startling.

Have fun, play Fech!