Restitched: Recapped! | December 2023 (Patreon)

Welcome to another Restitched: Recapped! post! In fact, welcome to the final post covering 2023's developments!

We're looking forward to an exciting 2024 with Stuffy, but for now, let's take a look back at how we closed out the year...

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Soundtrack Previews

We launched the Restitched: Soundtrack Preview feature in late December as YouTube videos. We're excited to share these snippets of the game's soundtrack with a wider audience! For trixel+ subscribers, these previews will continue rolling out as early access.

Check out the YouTube playlist of all current Soundtrack Previews!

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Code Conjuring

This month, as usual, we made plenty of commits to the code! Commits can contain either major changes or small tweaks, but this should give you an idea of how active our coders were during the month.

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Rebooting Gravity

As part of our shift to 3D Physics support, we discovered that the project's global gravity settings were off. After some digging, we found the source of this change and quickly set out to make it a value closer to what feels right to us. More changes are needed for each Building Material and Prop to ensure they're the right weights.

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Physics Fiasco

Early in the month, programmer Lewis created a 2D to 3D physics converter. Our developers use a special tool to draw the outline for a model. This is the collision shape that Stuffy and other objects interact with. When we changed to 3D physics, we made the collision for all objects accurate to their 3D models. However, this meant Stuffy and other objects could roll around instead of being locked inside a layer. While this may sound cool, it broke the level editor in certain ways, added extra development time when importing new assets, and made Stuffy's gameplay a bit awkward!

As a result of these issues, we decided to fall back to our old method of making the collision on objects just as thick as a layer itself. This fixed all those pesky issues and made the game a bit easier to play and build with.

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Stacking Effects

Halston started experimenting with stacking shaders in the Unity inspector panel. We hope to call upon this method through code, which would let us add all sorts of cool effects to Stuffy and other objects. For example, we could add a snow shader so that snow is always on the top of Props, or, more commonly, stack effects onto Stuffy so that you retain your current outfit choices but can see effects like fire, frost, wetness, etc.

The alternative method to this is coding in support for every effect in the shader itself, but this would mean every material in the game's files would need to use that shader! This isn't practical for us and limits what we can do, so we're hoping to just stack multiple materials instead.

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Colliding With Colliders

Before we reverted our collision to the 2D editor, Lewis took on the hefty task of creating a custom collision generator tool. This allowed us to select any Prop's mesh and generate a collider based on it, and even edit individual vertices of the collider. We decided this was not easy to use or even necessary, as layers in Restitched are simply preset sizes - meaning we could more easily draw the outline of the shape from a front view and extend it in depth as mentioned earlier.

The 2D to 3D collision tool is still handy for when we have missing colliders, in which case we can regenerate it for every Prop in the game at the click of a button!

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Switching Things Up

In the project's early development, we created multiple concepts for what switches and levers may look like. These are reliant on our logic system, which means they don't work just yet, but we've now imported them in-game to pave the way for their future function!

These were conceptualized by Ari Munoz Marin and modeled by former 3D Artist Matt. We've made a few tweaks and will continue to make more, but we think they're lovely!

Our current goal is to have multiple switch types. Here you can see a keyboard keycap button, a round fabric button, a lever, and another lever/switch. We're still deciding how many layers each of these should occupy for the best results.

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Working With Whiskers

Cade got busy this month and tried his hand at making Stuffy skins for the first time! He's been exploring outfits for cats, dogs, and more. Below you can see these work-in-progress skins:

Continuing the set, Cade created a set of animal ears and tails to accompany these skins:

We're aiming for a variety of ear shapes and types, so you can stylize your Stuffy as any animal or a hybrid of multiple. After all, they're a teddy bear meant to be rethemed!

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Styling Stamps

2D Artist Carter whipped up some lovely concepts for our in-development city environment for a future story-mode world. We're hoping to add these to the scenery for a bit of polish!

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Inverted, then Reverted

Sometimes we make silly little mistakes, like when Lewis and Michael were working with the collision generation code. After a small oversight, Prop colliders were importing backward. This bug has now been squashed thanks to our friendly team of exterminators.

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Stitching Up Stuffy

Stuffy's been a hot topic in our development lately! We're putting a lot of love and focus into their gameplay and moveset abilities, ensuring it's not only updated to work with 3D physics but also feels better in gameplay.

As a result of these discussions and fixes, Ozy stated:

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Restitching the Thread

Shedding light on the re-implementation of the Needle 'n Thread mechanic, coder Joseph stated the following in their progress update:

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Sewing a Song

Late in December, we saw the addition of a brand-new song for the game. This one is called Long Forgotten and our composer states that it's "mysterious" and "with a hint of space odyssey"!

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Saving Snippy Sounds

Halston adjusted sound effects across the game, including leveling audio volumes and replacing a few sound effects. As shown in an example video in the dev server, new cutting/deleting and brushing/placing sounds were added.

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Unwrapping and Restitching

The team's Graphic Designer, Halston, dabbled with motion design this month as he put together a new logo effect. We expect to use this quite a lot in upcoming promotional videos, including our eventual second trailer!

You can check out this effect right now in the latest Soundtrack Preview video on YouTube.

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Documenting Development

While we've almost always hosted our internal game documentation on the Trixel Creative website, we've decided to move to a private server website for more secure and robust ways to expand information for the development of the game. Now with the ability to edit each others' posts, create linking pages, etc., we hope to see more of the game's development practices and tips documented for future developers.

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Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Which Reflection Is Prettiest of Them All?

Halston jumped into a few backgrounds this month to update them for better performance and lighting settings. As part of this effort, the Celtic Harbour scene was found to have a broken reflection probe. After a quick fix, the water is now reflecting properly and looks better than ever!

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Nature and Neon

Taking existing assets in the game's files, Halston put together a new background with a focus on greenery and nature. This scene still needs a bit of love and care, but it's perfect for forest-inspired levels!

3D Artist Evan continued his developments toward the mysterious story background that we've teased in other Recapped posts. We're here to share a closer look at this theme and its location! More work is needed, but we're happy to see things shaping up!

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Polishing Popups

Later in the month, Michael added the ability to publish and delete levels from the main menu - something previously only possible from inside the level itself. As a bonus, he's also added a popup window confirming a successful publish. You can now choose to view your creation directly on Steam Workshop!

Continuing this train of thought, Michael also added a confirmation popup asking if you really want to delete a level. This will be handy to ensure you don't accidentally trash something you've been working hard on!

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Animatic Fanatic

Our wonderful Animators, Luke and Brennan, have continued their work on the game's first cinematic and trailer footage. We're eager to show you what's being made, but you'll need to wait just a while longer!

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Bouncing Ideas Around

After some team brainstorming, Halston pitched the idea of a self-contained, modular, sandbox-driven gameplay tool. We want it to be fun to traverse levels and play around with physics, so what better way to do that than by bouncing Stuffy around for fun?

Hot off these discussions, our 2D Artist, Daniel, took to the drawing tablet and created several early ideas for what a "Trampoline" gameplay object might look like. Is it bouncy? Switch-like? Springy or a catapult? Is it stretchy like fabric or netted? How many layers will it occupy, and how wide should it be? - These are all ideas we ask ourselves when deciding how to approach the idea!

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Lever-aging Our Options

While not conceptualized this month (or even this year!), we felt it fitting to include these lovely Switch and Lever concepts by Ari Munoz Marin. You can already guess which of these we settled on, as shown earlier in this post!

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Sketching and Slashing

The Grandiose Tales of Cpt. Stuffy continued development as usual during December, with the next page being sketched and ready for color! Here's a preview of one of the panels from an upcoming page:

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Peek-a-boo

by: Ozy

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Pull the lever, kronk!

by: Halston

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Wrapping Up 2023

That's all we have to share for December! We closed the year off with some great new additions to the game, and we're setting a solid framework to build on in 2024. We can't wait to share more of the exciting developments we're sure to make over the coming months.

See you in the next one!