Felipe Ribeiro Daneluz

Felipe Ribeiro Daneluz, mostly known by his alias "LakeFeperd," is a game developer from São Paulo, Brazil. He emerged from the Sonic fangame community with Sonic Before the Sequel, which was commonly praised around the time of its release. Since then, he has completed seven increasingly well-received projects. His most popular being Sonic After the Sequel, with Spark the Electric Jester having a small cult following.

History
In 2010, after compiling his ideas and researching on online forums, Lake began development on Sonic Before the Sequel, the first in a series of tributes to the Sonic franchise. The finished product saw release on December 15, 2011.

This game would signal exciting things to come for Lake, having already won the title of "Best in Show" at SAGE 2011 in the form of a demo. Despite a few bugs, the full BtS gained a large player base and eventually caught the attention of an amateur musician, Falk Au Yeong. Falk approached Lake with the intent to see if they could strike a deal for BtS to include its own original music. Lake was very interested, and the two planned an updated version of the game with a new soundtrack by a team of composers, itself releasing on August 5, 2012.

LakeFeperd hadn't slowed down at all by the time BtS was available to the players. A follow-up, Sonic After the Sequel, was being prototyped as Falk and his team was still writing their music. In 2013, not only did Lake release After the Sequel, but his fans were treated to the small experimental game Sonic Before the Sequel Aftermath. Which served as a basis for Sonic Chrono Adventure, a Metroidvania-styled Sonic fan game and the last fan game Lake made until he moved on to making the original games. Chrono Adventure ' s code also served as the basis for Spark the Electric Jester, his debut original title.

Lake also considered another Sonic fangame based on the anime Kill la Kill. Called "Shadow la Kill", with Shadow the Hedgehog being the main protagonist, but the idea of that fangame was scrapped, probably because Lake felt like moving on from Sonic and making Spark a thing.

Lake learned Unity in a short timeframe and used it for XF Racing Institute (2015). He bounced back and forth between XF and Spark, with Spark winning over his attention which later resulted in XF's cancelation.

Then after that, Spark 1 got a Kickstarter, which launched on July 27, 2015, with a goal of $7,000, but earned $9,162 and had 440 backers. It was planned to be released in Spring 2016 but then it got delayed to around August 2016, then to February 2017, and then to April 6th, then it was delayed once again for few days until April 10th. The reasons for these delays are because he was busy with college and other real-life occupations until he finished college. And the reason for the delay of February 2017 to April 2017 was because the Nintendo Switch was coming up in March so he didn't want to compete with the release of that console. In December of 2016, he, unfortunately, fell into clinical depression due to stress. Not only had it slowed down his progress on the game dramatically but it was also noted to be one of the worst periods of his life. He has since sought professional help and recovered. After this, Lake finished Spark 1.

At the time of the development of Spark 1, Lake had been dabbling with Unity for quite a while. He made some projects in college, then moved on to make his own 3D Sonic framework called "HedgePhysics" with the coding help of Héctor Barreiro-Cabrera. It was finished after Spark 1 ' s release, Hedge Physics was meant to be an open-source 3D framework for anyone to use.

After he finished the development of Spark 1, he has been making tutorials for people in Hedge Land (his discord server for game development). Related to Clickteam Fusion/Sonic Worlds Framework and Unity (for a bit).

On the 26th of August, Lake released an updated version for Sonic After the Sequel called "Sonic After the Sequel DX, which improved the physics and some performance, added the Drop Dash from Sonic Mania and a new final boss. But also broke some things in this version.

Now that he had a 3D framework, he thought to make his own 3D Sonic game which later turned out to be Spark the Electric Jester 2 (at the time, known as "Fark the Electric Jester").

Before he started the development of Spark 2, Lake went to revive XF with XF Racing Institute (2017). But later he canceled the project for unknown reasons and used its art style for Spark 2.

During Spark 2 ' s development, Lake decided to update Spark 1, giving it a complete story overhaul, fixing some bugs, and adding the hard mode for the 3 main modes of the game. Spark 2 unlike Spark 1 didn't have delays for its release date and it was released on 16th May 2019.

After Spark 2 ' s development, Lake decided to do a side project. He revisited XF in form of "XF DRIVE" which used the PS1 Art-style. It was later released on SAGE 2019 but it wasn't Lake's next big project and XF DRIVE was sadly put on an indefinite hiatus while he was working on the next big project.

He then made a Hedge Land dedicated channel on YouTube so that his main channel would be for his game projects while that particular channel is for Hedge Land/game development related things.

After posting many teasers of the next big project sparingly, on September 7th, 2020. The next big project was unveiled and turned out to be Spark the Electric Jester 3 with Spark 2 getting a port to the Xbox One. Spark 3 was planned to be announced far earlier but since Lake took that time to make the port of Spark 2 to Xbox One, it extended the development time of Spark 3. Spark 3 was originally meant to be the game about Choco, a customizable formie similar to Spark as seen in Spark 3. The concept went unused because Lake thought it wasn't a good idea, so he went back to Spark for Spark 3.

Trivia

 * In a QnA stream, Lake has stated that his favorite power-up is the Biker Jester from Spark 2. He has also stated his favorite song and stage from Spark 1 is Network Coast.

Chronology

 * Sonic Before the Sequel (2011)
 * Sonic Before the Sequel '12 (2012)
 * Sonic After the Sequel (2013)
 * Sonic After the Sequel DX (2017)
 * Sonic Before the Sequel Aftermath (2013)
 * Sonic Chrono Adventure (2014)
 * Spark the Electric Jester (2017)
 * Hedge Physics (a 3D Sonic framework made in Unity) (2017)
 * Spark the Electric Jester 2 (2019)
 * XF Racing Institute / XF DRIVE (Cancelled and revived plenty of times/on indefinite hiatus)
 * Spark the Electric Jester 3 (In Development)

Social Medias

 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * YouTube Channels: LakeFeperd, Hedge Land.
 * Tumblrs: LakeFeperd, SparkTEJ