Fech The Ferret recap - Q1 2020

Helo helo!

I noticed that announcements and news regarding the development of Fech The Ferret can become hard to keep track of, so today I want to quickly go over everything noteworthy that's happened during the past 3 months.

Let's start with the most apparent one:

3D art and additional 2D work, Lilly (@SheepShape) is the new artist in charge for dealing
with the characters of the project! Despite the announcement being quite recent, we've actually been working close together since the very end of 2019. I wish I could show you something of what she's been doing, but for now I can only stop a this one gif

And here's the announcement of her involvement in the project: https://twitter.com/RaoulWB/status/1236809445251874817?s=20

As I'm on the last year of Lyceum and I'll soon have l'esame di maturità, at the beginning of January I wanted to officially inform you all about my hiatus and the development of the game going on hold up until summer for everything concerning programming and game design; but as plans and imminent schedules kept changing, I was unable to properly say it and by the time everything was ready, it was March already. And a week later something quite ironic happened-

Suddenly back to work at full speed!
Despite all, despite the overall terrible effects of the current situation is having on a both macro and micro-economic and even social levels, covid-19 is basically saving my butt. School got a whole lot lighter, so a couple of weeks ago I came back to working on Fech The Ferret almost as efficiently as I usually do in summers!
I'm in a weird position, but on a purely egoistical level, I think I've never felt so lucky in my life.

Given I was expecting to go on a strict hiatus from January to June 2020, at the beginning of this year I decided to upgrade the tech that holds Fech The Ferret together: I updated to Unity 2019.3, updated FMOD and ditched the old render pipeline in favour of the new promising Universal Render Pipeline

(example of stuff that's happened in these chaotic times)

What does this mean? I consciously turned the project into a buggy mess imagining I would have lots of time to idly do my researches while waiting for useful updates to come so that once I would have been back everything would have, well, not ugly broken. As you know, this clearly didn't happen because I came back too soon and this fancy tech is still a bit rough. So I'm just suffering because I can't have my beloved ambient occlusion back yet.
Anyway, what I gained is the ability to create brand new shaders with the new Shader Graph and get overall much better performance, and, in particular the two combined- grass.

Lots of grass! Massive amounts of it, with tiny shiny shaders! As you know, foliage is what kept me busy during the earliest days of January (winter holiday) and the most recent ones. It's super cool stuff, but this is probably not the best place and time to start talking about intermediate programming techniques, so I'll just leave the most recent screenshot of this work in progress instead.
(don't worry, I will be back to talk about grass extensively)
(pls ignore the old 3D model)

After months of telling her she should she should have opened it, you can now follow the character artist of the game on twitter dot com @dramisdraws! She's an amazing artist, the one who did the drawings shown in recent character announcements here on this Patreon and also the person who drew Pamphila last Christmas

What's next? Well, a ton of exciting stuff really, it's the most so much I don't even know what to spoil right now, all I feel like saying is that I've been suddenly, and unexpectedly, getting back to music lately.

Oh! And as always, most of these things were already said on Fech The Ferret's discord server. I you want to get updated as soon as possible, or see more chaotic stuff, consider joining in! 

discord.gg/9QKKx6X