Developer diary,not press releases.
Reports from inside Project Feathers: decisions, experiments, release milestones, and the visible features that move this project forward.
Added staged dragonfly takeoff and pitched flight
Deploy resting wings, lift into a low hover, then steer with body pitch and redirected thrust.
Made the dragonfly camera follow body pitch
Tight-flight tracking sits behind the creature and follows climbs and dives.
Added hotkey cycles for the new creatures
Keys4,5 and6 cycle the new fox, butterfly and dragonfly alongside the existing variants.
Added Aurelia with a fuller distant coat
A new fox has revised face details, hair grooming and coat loft across camera distances.
Added Sylph, a layered butterfly
A separate reference-based butterfly uses the existing launch, landing and movement controls.
Added Opal, a detailed dragonfly
A separate dragonfly with segmented anatomy, compound eyes, veined wings and distance-aware fine hair.
Refined chipmunk forelegs and paw contacts
Pip has shorter, inset forelegs, aligned joint pivots and revised paw contacts.
Cleaned up fox ears, muzzle and distant fur
Revised grooming masks and lighting make the fox coat more consistent across camera distances.
Refined species walking and flight poses
Pip walks as a quadruped, Luma crouches and Aster perches, with smoother body and limb transitions into flight.
Improved insect banking, buzz and flight posture
Dragonfly banking and sprint have a clearer response, while the butterfly has revised ground and flight posture.
Added insect hover, takeoff and jointed walking
Prism and Iris have distinct flight controllers, grounded states, resting wings and six articulated legs.
Refined creature eyes, faces and wing hinges
The five new creatures have fitted eyes, continuous muzzles, revised proportions and better connected wings.
Added five new playable creatures
Luma, Pip, Aster, Prism and Iris join the creature selection, with native fur, feathers and insect membranes.
Updated foliage and shadows in the World Engine runtime
Feathers has the latest shipped foliage, shadow and distant-tree runtime refinements.
Added character copies to the studio
B adds copies of the current character for a visible studio crowd test.
Refined the short pelt and tail wind motion
Layered coverage and directional motion improve the optimized fox coat and tail.
Improved fox sidesteps and pivot steps
Pawn-relative lateral gait and pivot steps make Ember move more convincingly.
Added separate optimized owl and fox variants
The studio can compare the original creatures with lighter variants, including a revised fox gait and eye surfaces.
Added wind and wet-coat controls to the fur studio
Ember’s coat can be inspected from different views while wind and wetness change its response.
Added Ember, a playable cloud fox
Ember brings grounded four-legged movement and a fur coat to the character roster.
Added flight stamina and landing recovery
Powered wingbeats spend stamina, giving landings and perches a new role in longer flights.
Made wind currents visible during flight
T now reveals flowing wisps and thermal spirals during normal play.
Opened the eight-kilometre Feathers Wilds
Aurelie has a larger landscape of mountains, valleys and lakes to fly through.
Moved ground insects out of the tall grass
Open shoreline and slopes give Aurelie more visible insects to find around the lake.
Fixed the extra flight penalty while carrying a fish
A carried fish still adds weight, but it no longer stacks the penalty for leaving empty claws extended.
Made swooping fish catches more forgiving
A wider catch area beneath Aurelie’s feet helps a close swoop connect with a swimming fish.
Gave Aurelie a dedicated Melly call
Ctrl+Q plays the special Melly call, while Q keeps choosing from her regular cries.
Separated picking up food from eating
Aurelie can pick up and drop food with G, eat with F, and show what she is carrying in a dedicated badge.
Added live graphics settings and FPS history
The world keeps moving while graphics settings are open, so changes can be judged immediately.
Added time acceleration and fixed dusk freezes
Speed up the day and night cycle without speeding up Aurelie, and cross dusk without rebuilding the lighting shaders.
Reduced distant feather rendering work
Distance-based feather detail now spends less geometry and shading work on details too small to see.
Added a level picker and Character Studio
Choose the lake, Reach, practice course or character-only studio before loading the game.
Added WebGPU rendering and feather LOD
Feathers now uses the same WebGPU path as the World Engine, while Aurelie sheds millions of distant triangles without losing her silhouette.
Migrated the 3D World Engine to stress-test flight
Feathers now runs the studio's 3D World Engine, and an expanded lake-and-forest testing map is there to stress flight and frame rate.
Added a predator hawk enemy
A wild predator hawk now patrols, circles, and dives at Aurelie, while tree cover can deter its attack.
Added persistent fish meals and spoilage
A fish carried onto shore no longer disappears from the world; it becomes food with a limited number of bites and a clock running against it.
Expanded Willowglass Lake to 288 meters
Willowglass doubled in width and length, turning the familiar center into one part of a larger landscape instead of the whole map.
Added a day and night cycle, saves, and fruit
A 24-minute sky cycle, fruit-bearing deadwood, persistent saves, and gentler movement made the lake feel less like a test room.
Added health, hunger, climbing, and insects
Health, hunger, injury, food, crash damage, climbing, and woodland insects connected the creature to the consequences of moving through the lake.
Separated jumping, flapping, gliding, and braking
Running with open wings no longer launches Aurelie by accident; jumping, spreading, flapping, gliding, and braking became separate choices.
Added swimming, diving, fishing, and branch perching
Aurelie learned to float, paddle, dive, surface, catch fish, carry them through flight, and perch in the trees above the water.
Built Windflower Cove as a movement playground
Windflower Cove gave Aurelie a compact meadow, palms, shoreline, and thermal where every part of movement could be learned in one view.
Added physical flight, banking, and thermals
Jumping, flapping, banking, thermals, dives, and pull-outs turned the creature study into something that could be learned through motion.
Built Aurelie's first articulated feathered body
Project Feathers began with an owl-rabbit creature, a procedural coat, and the question of whether flight could feel physical without becoming joyless.