Restitched: Dev Diary | Designing Stamps (Patreon)

Stamps, stamps, stamps! They're the little things you put on mail envelopes or the ink-based cartridges that you see office workers slam on papers. You may know them from their signature "APPROVED" and "DENIED" marks, or you may be most familiar with the ones you get from a local post office for mailing letters. No matter which, Stamps have multiple forms and meanings, and with Restitched they're gaining yet another!

Stamps in Restitched (formerly known as "decals") are useful in-game graphics that can be placed on things in the world around you (or yourself!). They span across multiple different categories, and are especially useful to color things and add aesthetic/artistic flair to your level design. In this Dev Diary post, we will cover some of the amazing designs our team of artists has created for our "Stamps" system.

Stamp Categories

The Craftbook is our inventory UI, and it holds all of these Stamp graphics on one dedicated page. We have the graphics separated by multiple categories so they're easy to find. 

As it stands at this point in development, the Stamp categories are:

• Architecture (building facades, windows, pillars, etc.)
• Blemishes (Dirt smudges, fingerprints, realistic)
• Character Bits (faces, torso bits, limbs, etc.)
• Colors (Circles, squares, basic shapes involving individual colors)  
• Creatures (Animals, insects, monsters)  
• Drawings (Sketches, doodles, drawings)  
• Foliage (Trees, leaves, bushes, topiary, anything foliage) 
• Food (Produce, desserts, etc.) 
• Objects (Common objects like VHS tapes, bells, boxes, crates, household, etc.) 
• Patterns and Details (Patterns and things used to give geometry extra artistic flair)  
• Scenery (Clouds, mountains, rainbows, anything found you can describe as scenic)  
• Signs and Iconography (Logos, signs, arrows, fictional branding, prompts, etc.)  
• Text (Letters, numbers, or small strings of text)

The best way to test is by using, so don't be surprised if we tweak it a bit between now and later!

Stamp Designs

Our resident superstar in the Stampable graphics department is Carter (funnystuf). They're responsible for the majority of the graphics assets you'll see in the level design and Stamps menu! We also have designs from various team artists and graphic designers.

Take a look at some of the stamps made by designers on the team:

Creating the Stamps

As to be expected, every designer uses their own techniques, styles, and programs to create their art. For some it may be pixel-based, others vector-based, and some just hand-drawn regardless of format.

For the current two Stamp designers on the dev team, the go-to design program for Carter ("funnystuf") is a program called Clip Studio Paint. Carter uses a drawing tablet and a variety of in-app brushes to design their graphics. 

Art styles are flexible with Carter's design skills and program, but there's always a special playful aesthetic to Carter's designs that we all adore, and they use the designs to make incredibly creative things. A spider with a football body, for example!

For Halston (the project manager and Graphic Designer) creating Stamps is only a secondary task next to User Interface (UI) and icon design, as well as marketing/promo images, etc. At this early stage in development, we already have well over a hundred or more stamps, with the majority being created by Carter ("funnystuf"). 

Some of Halston's stamps can be seen in the credited images above on this post, but you'll notice a sometimes-distinct art style difference between those graphics and Carter's.

Halston uses Adobe Illustrator (with occasional editing in GIMP / Photoshop). The graphics are often created from shapes and with vector data (points), rather than pixel-by-pixel or with hand drawing. This allows for a lot of flexibility and defined edges that can easily be refined and changed, but this also means the art style is much more minimal and modern, whereas Carter's stamps can be more abstract, fuzzy or textured, and loose/playful.

Having a variety of stamp aesthetics from multiple designers and artists is useful because it allows more variety and broadly-useful assets to be added to the game for levels and creations. In other words, there are lots of Stamp flavors to choose from!

Interview with the Designers:

We've asked our current main Stamp designers (Halston and Carter) some questions!

• What would you explain Stamps as to someone who doesn't know them?

Halston: Stamps are like stickers or vinyl that you'd apply to a surface in real life. They're small graphics that you can stamp into the game world, whether it be to bring a level to life or to color a cosmetic you're wearing.

Carter: It's any 2-dimensional detail or decal applied to a surface! Whether it's a price sticker on fruit or flames on a hotrod. Anything that doesn't adjust the geometry or surface itself, but adds additional color or detail!

• What are your favorite types of Stamps?

Halston: My favorite stamps are the ones that you can use for multiple purposes. It's always interesting to see someone take something simple and use it for something entirely different, like a waffle stamp to match a skin tone or a popsicle stick as an architectural pillar, or buttons as eyes! My favorite category of stamps is probably decorative and objects since you can use patterns and abstract designs to really bring a level scene to life and give it flair and aesthetic!

Carter: Those that can be used to make little background npcs/characters! In UGC games like this, I always adore little cardboard cutout characters wobbling back and forth as you run through a level.

• How many Stamps do you hope to see in Restitched?

Halston: I think we already have like 100-200 or something, and that's just in the early development stages. I would love to see hundreds. It's really satisfying to see the Craftbook get populated with new stamps. I say the more the merrier! People should be able to use them for so many purposes and the Craftbook's search page will make it easy to find what you need.

Carter: Ideally -- 2.5 Trillion... Realistically -- A few thousand.

• What's your personal favorite thing about how Stamps are used?

Halston: As I mentioned earlier, I love how stamps are used extra creatively. Carter made a spider with button joints, a football body, and a coconut head. It's that type of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that gives creations their charm. I also love to see them used well in level design because it can really bring a theme to life.

Carter: I love seeing the creativity brought on by things like Stamps. I love seeing them used in versatile ways, and ways even the creators didn't know they'd be used for. They can be a major catalyst for user creativity!

• If you could add a feature to how Stamps work, what would it be?

Halston: Hmm... Good question!! I think it could be neat to directly change the hue/color of a stamp no matter what you're placing it on. I'd also love to see maybe animated stamps or those with their own special material properties; Like you could put a stamp on fabric but the stamp would be holographic, glittery, or shiny like how certain stickers might be in real life.

Carter: Being able to invert the color of a Stamp before it's placed down. So you could turn white Stamps black, or vice versa, or just turn a Stamp into a crazy inverted palette for those "weird" vibes.

• What's been the most challenging thing about designing Stamps?

Halston: The most challenging thing to me is making sure I'm designing them within the 1:1 aspect ratio and designing it so that the finer, smaller details are still apparent even when it's scaled-down and compressed. Another big challenge is making sure they're actually useful designs that people will want to use and can be creative with.

Carter: Figuring out how to make it as multipurpose as possible! Usually I have to stop myself from going overboard.

• What's been your favorite Stamp to work on thus far? (show us!)

Halston: My own favorite stamp? Hmm... I haven't made as many stamps as I would like to, and I specifically really like a few of them, but I will say I like the mail envelopes. I don't know why, but they're really satisfying to look at I guess! I know they're technically two different stamps but I can't show just one!

Carter: Some old faves of mine include the Pop Star character pieces, but some of my new favorites I actually made the other night are the Gingerbread Folk Stamps! There's 2 bodies and 2 heads, one decorated and one plain version of each, perfectly baked for inhabiting that gingerbread village you have lying around!

• Can you give us a little spoiler about the game's story?

Halston: Oh, I'm sure people are eager to know! Just to preface, the level editor is the foundation of the whole game including the story we want to build and we're very early on even building that. We have a lot of the story planned but not fully detailed, so it's hard to comment on it this early. Howeverrrr, I know that there's a reason it's called "Restitched" and Stuffy had to come from somewhere! Also, everything's meta... Eat up y'all, because that's all I can say!

Carter: It exists. -- ...Okay, fine. Let's just say there's a reason I'm making so many baked goods Stamps, and it may or may not involve my favorite planned world in the game.

Well, if that wasn't a tease, what is? We hope you've enjoyed this slightly more in-depth look at the Stamps in Restitched. Keep on the lookout in 2021, because we will have contest opportunities so that one or more lucky winners can have their own graphics featured in-game as a Stamp!

Thank you so much for reading our Dev Diary posts! We're stoked to be building Restitched and we thank you for your interest in its development and your support for us. We love that we can share these little insights into the project with you, even if it's just snippets of a much larger picture.

Your support on Patreon is already helping us tremendously, and we've been able to cover project storage hosting, domain fees, future giveaway opportunities, and we're working toward legal registration fees for the future that can be quite costly.

We always love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to comment on this post or message us!