version 1.01 update

What's new: 

• 2  cats added 
• 2x view mode added
• beginning of game remade to be interactive
• several old rooms redrawn in a newer style
• a handful of rooms added 
• one extra scene added, hidden behind a new "puzzle" 

That's all of the interesting information! I've never written a devlog before so I'm going to permit myself to drop a bit of disorganized rambling. 

I did the bulk of the work on FB&C when I was 18, and now I'm three years older. It's hard not to look back at the early work and cringe at some of it. Surely this is an extremely common problem with single-dev projects– you grow as you work on them and then feel the urge to toss out all of the early work. Then, once you've remade the early work, you've grown even more and now want to toss out even more, trapping you in a vicious and unproductive cycle. 

I tried to avoid this here by not razing the project and instead just focused on a few of the most major things I wanted to change.  The opening was previously a monologue over a static background, which seems to me now a rather clumsy way to open a game. I extended the dream sequence to give a more multidimensional portrait of Lera's childhood. Because so much of the game builds on this idea of "parasitic nostalgia", it seems a little odd if you get the idea that her childhood consisted only of negative experiences– why would she want to go back to that? Here, I tried to make this opening in her childhood apartment feel warm without being cloyingly sweet. 

(As a side note, I originally wanted the crows to carry off the corpse in pieces, making it more clear that it was a dreamlike sequence and not a literal memory, but I didn't have the skills to animate that.) 

There's now a 2x view mode which you can toggle by opening the menu with ESC.  Hopefully it isn't too buggy. 

There's also now an extremely rudimentary "puzzle", which can barely be called a puzzle, that unlocks a hidden scene. I hesitated to add any puzzle elements because players might now assume that the rest of the items also serve some purpose, and they still don't. They're just little fragments of imaginary lives. I wish I could have come up with some clever puzzle that utilized a clove of garlic, a preschool primer, and cigarettes, but I couldn't think of anything. 

Thank you for reading, and thank you everyone for your extended support, kindness, and empathy. I read and think about every comment left on the game's page, and when I try to reply, I feel like the words "thank you" rarely capture the deep sense of gratitude that I feel. 

(The old version is still accessible at waxwing0.itch.io/fbc1 with the password fancyrat.)