The fanfare of the 2013 PC video game FEZ is largely known for not just their signature inter-dimensional gameplay mechanics, but it grew to be associated with the colorful character and personality of the game’s designer, Phil Fish. One would’ve thought the game wouldn’t get updates again, after Mr. Fish made a very high-profile exit from the public light.
But apparently work on the game wasn’t quite finished at that point. A few days ago, update 1.12 was officially released to the public.
FEZ wasn’t all Phil Fish’s work alone. He had the help of a programmer by the name of Renaud Bédard, who saw to the overall development of this final 1.12 update. A few days ago he made a lengthy blog post going into the technical objectives that were aimed for here. For the simple folks who don’t care about the nitty-gritty, the bottom line is the game now runs better, has less bugs, and a speedrunning mode to try out.
But in case you were curious what changes are under the hood, Bédard outlined his main goals:
- Cut dependencies to OpenTK: The platform framework caused windowing, sound, and graphical issues for the PC version of FEZ. Switching to SDL 2.0 was forecasted to have better results in comparison.
- Have more efficient music streaming: The PC + Mac version used the “NVorbis” C# Ogg Vorbis decoder, which worked well across all platforms, but it was heavy on resource and disk usage.
- Have a single codebase for all PC/Mac versions of FEZ: Mac and Linux versions of the game ran on a MonoGame “MG-SDL2” hybrid, while the PC version ran on a fork of MonoGame 3.0. For maintenance reasons, having everything as centralized as possible works best.
That laid the groundwork for the resulting full change log that came out of Renaud’s venture. Due to the motivation from co-developer Ethan Lee, and the help of a team of play-testers, Renaud was able to get results after a long years worth of work.
FEZ has been on PC (Mac/Linux) in addition to console platforms for the past few years now. If you haven’t checked out the game by now, this is one of the last new reasons to do so that you’ll ever get.
