Fech The Ferret recap - Q3 2020

Helo helo!
I was a little caught up with work these days, so here's our quarterly report - a week late.
As usual here's a link to the last report in case you missed it.
Aaand let's start talking about these 3 pretty crazy months of development, beginning directly with the what all these months were leading up to:

You heard me talk about it all year. Last month SAGE finally happened! and it was a blast, a wonderful (and chaotic) experience. It's a bit of a shame that the SFGHQ site kept crashing, me and Alex worked pretty hard on getting a nice looking entry on the site which you can still access by clicking here. Anyway, during SAGE we received lots of new feedback, unfortunately the builds I sent for it - especially the first one - were quite broken, pretty much held together with tape, so many reported bugs such as running without input or even just flying away! which is why-

A new build fixing most of issues of the SAGE demos, including the oddly subpar performance (a 50%-100% boost since then!) and the confusing level design of the first half of the ferrest.
You can download it from my Itch.io page! https://raoulwb.itch.io/fech-the-ferret

This piece took a whole month to make, initially sketched by Marten, this huge piece was made by Alex in August. Managing this work proved to be quite of a challenge for me, but the final results are stellar!



The soundtrack of these pre-alpha demos has been finally uploaded on Bandcamp! It includes all tracks that have been present on public builds to date. I spent some time polishing up most of these tracks, have a listen here!
https://raoulwb.bandcamp.com/album/fech-the-ferret-pre-alpha-ost



Now let's talk about some details that didn't really get in the spotlight, let's go in order and start with Lilly's work on Powie! They look quite great now, he's reached the point of being really close to his intended appearance!



Aaand of course I can't not speak about my beloved grass. Here's a screenshot I took last month. Now this lush foliage only needs to become more performant: it's currently the heaviest element on the game, which is also why it eventually got toned down compared to how it looks in this picture. Currently, I can't do much about performance since I'm mostly waiting for Unity updates to do that, for sure I will tell you about it when changes happen in this regard.

And now to the last big thing:

 No, Fech The Ferret is not coming out anytime soon. But a page for it is finally up! If you're curious about how this game will eventually become, definitely wishlist the game, so you'll get notified sometime in 2022!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1382980/Fech_The_Ferret/

As you might have seen in the discord server, soon after SAGE there's been a bit of movement about finding new people to work with. This is actually not just limited to that "comic-styled artist" role, but, well, I cannot spoil any further about this 👀. I can just say we're settled, see you again on this topic in two recaps from now!

Just like last time, let's end this recap with some outstanding (fan)art of these last 3 months!

and two additional pieces of pixel art! First one by Makeshift (@MakeshiftKazoo) for a Fech cameo in his game, Midi & Melody; the second one is Fech as a Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart racer, made by VAdaPEGA (@VAdePEGA).


Lastly I'm adding two bonus artworks that are just incredible:
first a massive celebration of all SAGE indies by Brock Crocodile team:  https://twitter.com/BrockCrocodile/status/1304774218228391947
and an adorable animation starring Lance from Shield Cat and Fech:  https://twitter.com/EveyWorlds/status/1312154303268745218
...also, please let me share some facetious tweets:
do it to em powie:  https://twitter.com/SheepShape/status/1290405584202641408
ballpit fech:  https://twitter.com/SheepShape/status/1301983927725244416
buff feches:  https://twitter.com/RaoulWB/status/1308801858819981315 


We have a new twitter page for following only the news about Fech The Ferret!
You can find it at: https://twitter.com/aucritas
My own twitter account (https://twitter.com/RaoulWB) will become a bit more active instead.

Wow, this ended up being a lot longer than expected, and I didn't even cover everything like the wonderful modeling work by Alex or the new logo update I did recently!
...
Well! see you next time! Before then, look forward to the next game update and a little announcement in store for this month here on this patreon page!