Fart Together's roster is part of its identity rather than a separate collectible layer. The hippos in particular have become the game's most recognisable image, and they are not a marketing invention - they come straight from the developers' own description of their testing process.
The game's Steam tags include Animals and Cute, and coverage of the Steam Next Fest demo roundup led with a headline about farting hippos. More tellingly, the studio's own About text describes the development process as tuning raft physics, designing courses, and "tested hippo farts" - the phrase appears in their own writing, unprompted.
So the hippos are canon, they are playable, and they are the running gag the developers have leaned into hardest. If you are wondering what a Fart Together character is: it is a hippo, and the studio would like you to know that they tested the farts.
The Early Access announcement specifically calls for an expanded roster of playable characters, letting each player pick and joke about their avatar. The demo already carried a group of characters described as troublemaking students, and the Early Access build adds to that. Expect the roster to be a live area of development rather than a finished list.
GamesMrkt is a small independent studio that has been developing games since 2018 and describes itself as "a little too excited about releasing our first game on Steam". They say their previous projects have reached millions of players across different platforms, though this is their first release on Steam - which means the studio is experienced but the game is new to the platform's discovery systems.
The origin story is in the Steam page's own words: the original idea for the game came from the toilet, and some creative processes are better left mysterious. The first version took two intense and fairly chaotic months of development, during which the team tuned raft physics, designed courses, and - by their account - used the phrase "fart direction" in work meetings far more often than anyone probably should.
Their stated mission is worth quoting, because it explains the design brief better than a feature list does: they made Fart Together so players can "laugh, shout, blame your friends, and eventually say, 'One more try'". If the game gives players and spectators a few unforgettable funny moments, they consider the job done. That is a party game first and a challenge second - and it explains why the failure states are designed to be funny rather than punishing.