Restitched: Recapped! | April 2024 (Patreon)

Hey, hello, and howdy!

Welcome to the official recap of April's developments toward Restitched. The team has made some very exciting progress recently! Several of us have had busy schedules with university, work, etc. Because of that, we weren't operating at full capacity, but we still managed to make April a very productive month!

Let's dive in and see what new things await, shall we?

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New Asset Preview

An all-new Asset Preview is now public! This one features a Cosmetic and Building Material. You'll see more of both later in the post!

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New Soundtrack Preview

A new 30-second Soundtrack Preview went live on YouTube on the 11th of April. This one is a showcase of the "Saving For You" Wardrobe music!

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Discord Server Update

After a spike in activity, we decided to bring back the Daily Question event on our server for more exciting discussions and engagement. Members who opt-in will receive a special channel and daily ping.

Anyone can submit questions to be asked, and we'll occasionally use it to talk about Restitched - including getting your feedback on ideas and brainstorming features together!

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New Promo Content

We've also released some new promotional material, including a cool new screenshot (which is now on the Steam store page) and a GIF of the beloved Gummy Bear outfit in action.

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New Internal Build

This month we launched a new internal Steam build for developers. We aim to launch new builds after every milestone or significant change. Pushing a new Steam build can be tedious work, so we make a point not to do it too often!

Not all of our developers work within Unity or Git, but it's important they receive the latest version of the game so that we can gather feedback, stay in the loop, and celebrate our progress together.

Some of the features this latest build introduced can be seen in the image below:

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Project Alumni Credits

We've dedicated a new section of our website's "Join Us" page to acknowledging previous team members (including Moderators). This isn't an extensive list, though we've tried to mention as many people as possible!

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Team Votes

We had new team voting opportunities this month, like whether or not to restore the 'Stuffy drop shadow' feature:

We also discussed a new visual indicator for placing Stuffy in the level editor. In this idea, a chalky and unlit (meaning it shows up no matter what) circle will appear under the player during placement mode. This would help creators see how deep Stuffy is being placed in the scene, and what platform they'll land on.

While we love this idea, we're not ready to test it yet! This was only a quick and staged concept.

Last but not least, we also posted a vote/discussion for which new Craftbook color schemes the team wants to see added:

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Over 100 commits were made to the game this month, with the majority of Git pushes being made by Ozy and Halston:

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Let There Be Fog

Support for global fogginess was restored this month. We found that a faulty piece of code had disabled the feature, but changing the way we adjust fog intensity made this an easy fix.

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Thin Props

We discovered that support for thin Props technically already exists in the game, but the way placement is handled prevents it from being used without softlocking edit tools. We were able to import a thin-layered Clothing Hanger to test this:

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Colliding Colliders

We're looking into a way for thin Prop colliders to only affect the player when they're part of certain Props.

For example, we want to place two glass jars with one behind the other. The thin colliders that prevent the player from walking in/out of the jar are also causing the jars to stack by accident.

However, we do want solely thin Props (like clothing hangers) to interact with each other. More thought on how to achieve this will be done when we're in a polish phase, as we don't consider this an urgent feature.

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A Light Adjustment

Placeable, invisible light sources are now properly rotated so the icon matches the angle of the beam! We also removed a strange radius highlight effect that dates back to very old code.

Originally, the highlighted radius was meant to show how far the light shines. This is no longer needed, as we've changed the lighting tech completely since then!

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Music Scripting

Placeable music objects are now equipped with new scripts, allowing us to modify the volume, pitch (including reversed music playing), detection radius, and more. When you enter the zone of one music track, any formerly-activated music will stop playing and be replaced by the latest trigger.

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Building Together

Another exciting thing we tested this month (but did not develop for specifically) is networking. Deep in the dev menu is a networking feature that dates back to the first two years of development. As the game has changed over time, we expected this feature to break and nobody has tested it since.

Halston and Thomas ran the game on two different PCs, connected through the Networking debug menu, and were able to see realtime updates as they smeared materials, placed things in the scene, changed level settings, etc.

It's still very rough around the edges and doesn't properly sync with physics or some features, but to see our framework of multiplayer doing its job is still very impressive and promising for the future!

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Cade's Creative Collection

Cade continued his usual amazing work, giving us several new 3D models to use as Props in-game. Let's take a stroll through them!

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Treasure Chest and Treasure Chest (Open)

Ship Anchor

Beach Ball

Mason Jar and Jar Lid

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Perfecting Perfume

Another new Prop called 'Vintage Perfume Bottle' was made, but we had difficulty importing it with our current Prop system. After some feedback, we settled on moving the pump onto the lid of the bottle.

We also used a new shader to create a refractive/distorting effect on the glass, as well as a subtle and fake Subsurface Scattering technique. This means the glass will illuminate a bit whenever a light source is behind or near it.

We also tried to add a liquid shader inside, but it wasn't cooperating or performance-friendly, so we ditched it. Let's just pretend it's full (or empty)!

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The Synthwave background created during early development has sadly become outdated. We've seen many changes to how we import and set up environments, adjust their settings, and how many layers a background should occupy (formerly 5 - now 15).

So, Carter started making a new and improved Synthwave scene that addresses these problems:

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Building Materials? Gameplay enhancers? New shaders? Particle effects? We've got 'em all!

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Batch of Props

As mentioned, the latest Prop models were added in-game this month. Aren't they beautiful?

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Glass Shader

We have an increasing need for glass-based objects. We want these to be flexible and varied in style, so we've updated our default "Refractive Glass" shader. This shader is shared across a few Building Materials and Props, and allows us loads of options! We can adjust the lighting, texture maps, distortion effects, etc.

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Particles and Effects

We've also added a new placeable particle to the Hardware chapter of the Craftbook. This is a 'Dust Motes' effect. You might notice it also exists in the Attic Atelier level background!

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Placeholder Spikes

A basic placeholder model for spikes was added to test new death triggers. We're working with our lovely 3D artists to create proper stylized spikes for different themes. We'll be sharing those when they're ready!

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Stuffy's Fans

Our 'Fan' Hardware object has been updated with proper animations, sound effects, and particles. Further work is planned to improve the streamers and add other styles.

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New Materials and Shaders

We've refined our quicksand shader to be a bit more realistic! It now uses a flowmap effect instead of basic panning textures. We'll refine this later with particle effects that spawn around the edges, indicating that it's a special and lethal material.

The beauty of shaders is repurposing them, which we did for the Acid Pool material. This originally uses the quicksand shader but with several tweaks to its effects:

Anyone like jelly? or do you call it jam? Fret not, because we've added a "Jelly Jam" Building Material to the 'Food' category! This goopy and flowy material even reacts to light by illuminating.

This was originally a static texture, but we animated it at the community's request!

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Dress-ing Up

We took a quick peek at the rigging of recent Cosmetics on Stuffy's model this month. We'll need to adjust some shape keys and weight painting, but everything is working as intended! When we're less swamped with urgent coding tasks, we'll begin importing our latest Wardrobe goodies to be used in-game.

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New Skins

We also showed off a few new skins last month, but now they're available in the Wardrobe. Doesn't Stuffy look so adorable with these new looks? Slay.

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3D Rotation Bug

We're no strangers to pesky bugs, and Restitched is often full of them during development. This month we are still dealing with a strange 3D rotation bug that only affects grouped objects.

Interestingly, the data is being serialized (saved) normally and slotted into layers. However, the real-time physics interaction is causing it to tilt and rotate as if it were a 3D game.

We've locked the 'PhysicalGroup' prefabs to prevent this, but the bug persists. We're now looking into whether this is overridden by code, or if it's a Unity bug we should work around.

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Misaligned Terrain

We've fixed a few terrain-related things this month, including backgrounds that weren't quite aligned with Stuffy's feet or the level borders.

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Glass and Shadows

A bug that prevented shadows from casting through glass has been fixed. This was formerly disabled through code because we used a custom voxelized shadow system. Now that it's been removed, there are no complications with natural Unity shadows - allowing us to restore it.

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Dataset Delinquent

When we add new Props or Hardware (placeable objects), their datasets must be 'reimported'. We draw the collision for every placeable object manually by using preset shapes and a freeform polygon tool.

This new bug makes it so only colliders from preset box shapes are generated. It ignores any custom colliders we've drawn. The Props dataset can be fixed by reimporting it, but then the Hardware dataset breaks... however, for some reason only the physical Lights objects break!

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Our Lead Coder, Ozy, has put a lot of effort into refactoring Stuffy's movement and physics recently. The goal isn't to change how Stuffy plays overall but to fine-tune what we have.

One example is by making sure the player reacts to natural forces. We want less emphasis on hard-coded movement and a more natural interaction with the world. For example, instead of forcing Stuffy down after a jump, we'll let them fall with gravity.

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Slope Surfer

The biggest efforts have been going toward slope detection and improving the ability to walk, jump, and slide on them. Animations for slipping, sliding, and stumbling now need to be added back in.

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Fun with Fans

We've not only added the Fan visuals this month! We've introduced a new script that will force the player away from the fan, with a choice of intensity. This makes for some very fun gameplay ideas!

Fans can be paired with other gameplay objects to make fun platforming challenges:

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Bouncy Bear

We've added another new gameplay object this month called the Trampoline, or Launcher (we've yet to decide on the theming). This is a simple object that propels the player on impact, but opens up a lot of fun physics-based gameplay!

As you can see, these are still early placeholder assets (we just exported a flat cube in Blender). We'll soon be updating them to look and behave much better! We're excited about this big step toward more advanced physics gameplay.

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Combat Coding

We don't have a lot of exciting things to show for the combat and enemy system yet, but Joseph has been working on getting things working. We'll likely keep our first enemy type a surprise for now, because we want to be sure it works out as planned!

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Ouchie!

When implementing lethality support, we also added a way for Stuffy to get burned on the first bounce with fire-related things. If you touch a lethal thing within a couple of seconds after the first bounce, Stuffy dies!

We're still working on the visuals for this, including shader effects on the player, animation, etc.

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In the constant quest to refine, our graphic designer, Halston, has touched up a few pieces of the in-game UI this month. A functional game has been a priority over polishing, so you can expect these to continue evolving and improving over time!

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Scale Adjustment

Some of these changes include adjustments to the overall scale of things, while other changes involve swapping out icons, graphics, and building entirely new menus.

Halston stated:

It's always tricky to design UI at the right scale. Everyone has different screen sizes, and a global UI slider is a tough thing to implement if you don't support it from the start. So, it's a balancing act to make the UI small enough to feel 'breathable', and big enough to see well on different resolutions and screens.

While we may one day have a setting to adjust UI size more in-depth, I'm focused on finding a good default balance for now. It's hard to judge the size of things because it's usually made in the Unity editor with a small preview window. So, it may look tiny during development but be huge when you launch a proper build.

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Workshopping The Workshop

One of the biggest changes to UI this month was the proper design of "The Workshop". This is our in-game menu for browsing community creations. We've added section buttons, improved the "card" style, and moved advanced filters to another menu nested in a button beside search.

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Loading the Loader

We've also added the basis of a new loading screen, complete with changing text and tips. Having a loading screen just makes it feel like a proper game, right??

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New Music

Our team's composer, Thomas Voets, has been on a streak this month! We've received a staggering total of five new tracks for the game's official score. These tracks span multiple genres and styles, and they'll surely be a perfect fit for your levels!

Some of the new tracks include:

• Brass Knuckles

• Moon Bass

• Depths of Darkness

• Dirge of the Damned

• For All to See

Keep an eye out for Soundtrack Preview posts, where we often tease 30-second previews of the game's music!

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Musical Imports

We've also been busy adding around 28 of the latest tracks to be placeable in-game. These music items are found in the Hardware chapter for now, but we have plans to move them into their own chapter where they'll be categorized alongside sound effects.

We've even asked our team of artists to start chipping away at custom thumbnails for each music track!

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Logic, logic, logic! The highly-anticipated discussions have started again this month, as Lead Coder Ozy and Project Lead Halston have been chatting about how and where to dive back into this feature. While we're still focusing on other things first, we hope for a return to the development of our logic framework in the coming months.

Until then, we've dug into our concept archive to show what sort of theme we have in mind for visuals. These concepts were made by our 2D artist Ari way back in 2020/2021:

The idea of logic in Restitched has been through many phases. We've explored placing it in the world as Ornaments, placing it mid-air like objects, and even having a special UI mode called "Logic Overlay" or "Blueprints" (like Unreal Engine). All of these have been prototyped in some form, but we find it much easier to have logic based in the level itself rather than in UI.

Ultimately, the visual style is meant to play into 'stitching' and 'restitching'. Logic boards would be quilts, and logic 'patches' would be sewn onto the quilts and connected via thread.

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Cinematic Progress

We've teased it several times already, but for those who aren't aware, we've been working on a significant part of the beginning cinematic for Restitched's story. We're looking to use this as footage in our next trailer, and our animators Luke and Brennan have been knocking it out of the park!

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Testing Death

We've had a few death styles animated for a while now but were only recently able to set it up properly. Here's an example of us testing support for death types in the game directly!

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Captain Stuffy is still sailing toward its finale! Our talented comic artists are already working through the final few pages, and here's a look at their progress on page 28:

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We'll be answering a few more questions from our Discord server community!

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Quacker:

How will published level icons work? Like can you make them with stamps in game, upload your own image, or will it be chosen as a preview of the level

When you save a level the game captures a screenshot of the level editor's camera position. This serves as a default level thumbnail and is used both in the "My Levels" menu and "The Workshop".

We think it's important to make appealing level thumbnails, but we also still want them to be representative of the actual creation - meaning you get to see what the level really looks like. So, we're hoping to add a custom image upload for Workshop thumbnails but may also look into in-game level captures.

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icey:

Will we be able to import .Fbx/.obj assets into our levels?

We have no plans for supporting modded content and custom imports. We have a full statement on that here.

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Aresydatch:

How much has the scope of the game evolved throughout development to a much higher scope than what you originally had in early development? When did you start having more confidence with your vision towards the game?

Honestly, we went into the project not knowing what to expect. We were all very new to game dev, but passionate enough to tackle any obstacle it brings. Our original scope was always ambitious, so we've had to taper it down over the years. Part of this is because we want the game to be released in a realistic timeframe, but also because the original ideas no longer fit what the game has become.

The current scope for the game isn't as ambitious as it was when we started. The scope is always going to be high when you start something because you're excited and the world is your playground. Once you've discussed all your great ideas, you'll usually find that some of them start to get kicked aside or removed entirely.

Our confidence in the game is stronger than ever because now we have a clearer picture of what it is and where it can go. It's exciting to be part of even through all of the hard work ahead.

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Joto:

What is the likelihood of post launch content being added once you feel comfortable with the state of bugs and other problems being fixed?

We're only focused on building the main game right now, so any post-launch ideas have only been brought up for fun. We have no real plans for this yet.

We'd all love to continue updating the game with new content after it's released and stable. This would be a key move to keep the community thriving and to bring in new players! It depends on how active the player base is, but we'd be down for it.

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JeanAdel:

When are you planning to work on the remaining stuffy's appearances from the last contest?

This is a great question! We're sorry we've not been able to share updates on the winning entries from our Style-A-Stuffy design contest. We've completed the Masked Mage outfit and have made pieces of other outfits, like Baby Stuffy.

Truthfully, we've just been far too swamped with more urgent features as the game's development has become a bit more demanding since then. Finishing these outfits is definitely still on our to-do list.

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Jarl Gato:

in the unlikely event the project dies would you upload whatever work you had done for the public to play with or possibly build upon as an open source project or would you just leave it be?

We're prepared to do everything in our power to keep the project alive and headed toward a finished version. In the unlikely event something would prevent this, we'd still ensure our years of hard work will live on in any form we can manage. However, we'd never open-source the project due to copyright and contract conflicts.

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Fate:

Will we be able to connect levels to each other? In other words, if I make a really big level that requires more space than I’ve already used, and find that I need to finish my creation in another level, and have the player seamlessly transfer from one to the other, will that be possible?

If Steam Workshop allows this (we think it does), then it's certainly possible to add. We've not added a feature like this yet, but we'll be looking into it later on. Steam also offers a Collections feature that acts as a playlist for multiple Workshop items.

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Foggy

by: Halston

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Wheelbarrow Peep

by: Halston

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Stuffy Wildin'

by: Luke

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Up and Away

by: Halston

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That does it for this month! Thank you, as always, for tagging along as we look back on another month of exciting progress.

Restitched is rooted in passion, and it's important to remember that we're building this project out of desire (and as a learning experience). We're all hobbyists doing this in our free time!

We deeply appreciate your kind words and encouragement! We'll continue working hard to build a special experience, but we ask that you bear with us as we're all very new to this journey.