Restitched: Recapped! | October 2022 (Patreon)

Well, spooky month is officially behind us. And with that, Stuffy has packed their Halloween costume back into their attic, and is changing their tune to a more thankful one in preparation for Thanksgiving! 🦃

But enough of those shenanigans, let's take a look at what our amazing Restitched developers got up to in October 2022!

October was a huge month for us - especially for trixel+, where our subscribers celebrated the second anniversary of trixel+ with a plethora of additional goodies, such as the introduction of a new exclusive Restitched: From The Vault series that explores forgotten and discarded content that hasn't found a home on our Recapped! or Dev Diary features!

We also released four exclusive Restitched: Soundtrack Previews, each one showcasing a 30-second snippet of a different track in the game. We showcased Cherry Blades, Agent Stuffy, Dancing Dandelions, and Hallow Hallways!

And of course, who could forget about the Sticker Pack Contest? We gave away 30 Sticker Packs which included 2 trixel+ anniversary stickers (featuring Stuffy, Cpt. Stuffy, Puddles, Charlie, and Eloise), as well as a Restitched logo sticker, a Trixel Creative sticker, and a lovely note! Already got yours? Why not post it on socials and tag us?

In October 2022 we made a total of 250 commits to the code! As per usual, we can't go over everything here (we've gotta leave some surprises!), but we have lots to show in the meantime!

We're still hot on our months-long streak of Prop development! This month saw the addition of a Ruler created by Snatxi and edited by Halston, and a Wooden Bucket by Cade!

I guess now we truly know the one true Ruler of Restitched.

In preparation for our October wallpaper, Luke began crafting a super spooky and ghostly costume for our little bear friend! Unfortunately, we couldn't quite get this outfit right in the time we needed to. Regardless, here's a little glimpse into what could have been:

This month saw the long-awaited introduction of a proper shader editor plugin (funded by our lovely trixel+ patrons!), allowing us to create a plethora of new visual effects for the game, such as tesselated icicle shards and a dynamic frost effect!

Halston proceeded to try experimental work on shaders this month, developing the above icicle shader and a debug wireframe shader that allows us to see mesh generation for building materials. These shaders allow for a much more diverse aesthetic to our levels, and we can only imagine the creative possibilities they could unlock for our community! 

Below is an image of the icicle effect as it was made on a shader graph:

Currently, there's a big issue with using new shaders, as it prevents us from applying our custom lighting solution and Stamps rendering system. We're working to become more familiar with shaders, but if you're a programmer with shader experience then consider applying to help out via our website!

These are still super early experiments and brought along issues to iron out, but they give a cool (no pun intended) glimpse into what is possible with fancy new tools!

Our Lead Programmer Michael has taken a big step in keeping the project up-to-date. This month we made a substantial leap to a much newer version of the Unity engine, which remedies several bugs we frequently run into as developers. As a result of the upgrade, he's been knee-deep in error messages cleaning up old code. There are over a thousand error messages to clear!

Michael also made a breakthrough on the Collision Editor we mentioned in last month's Recapped! post. After taking some time away from this task due to a roadblock that prevented mouse inputs from registering properly, Michael returned to it with a fresh perspective and managed to solve the problem! Development on this crucial developer tool has now resumed, and we expect to be overhauling our Props' hitboxes soon!

Call him butter because he's on a roll! Michael proceeded to also work more on a new level save system, which includes the use of folders. Though this is currently in development, the plan is to include the ".restitched" level file packaged alongside other important assets like the level icon. Fun fact: our player save file ends in a ".teddy" extension!

A very annoying issue regarding Building Material smearing and stamping has been present in the game for a number of months now. This mysterious bug seemed to appear out of thin air but decided to stick around. The issue involves smearing or placing an existing Building Material that has been cloned. When placing the cloned material it would miscalculate the math and smear it further than intended, sometimes double the length or height of the original material shape!

Fortunately, Michael, Halston, and Stuffy didn't take too kindly to this pest overstaying its welcome and immediately worked to isolate and squash it once and for all. Below you can see a portion of Michael's thoughts as he worked through debugging this:

Further large bug fixes include Stuffy no longer doing endless physics calculations in placement mode, which helps performance and prevents them from trying to play animations when dragged over gameplay areas.

Michael also managed to clean up some code this month, eliminating a few lingering errors in the engine's console each time the project was opened or the game was launched!

This month, we furthered the discussion regarding background and foreground 'Decor Zones', inspired by this concept from Halston. These zones wouldn't be interactive for the player but would allow for some additional creative depth to levels. 

We've been discussing this feature idea for a long time now, but as the game evolves we like to keep some of our larger ideas up-to-date with it!

An important gameplay mechanic we've been spitballing for a while is that of a lives system. Daniel created this lovely concept art for what a life pick-up could look like in-game, and this again spurred an in-depth conversation with fellow devs...

...including this quick concept by Halston which experimented with how life and collectible tracker HUD could look in-game.

As we further look into how to broaden Stuffy's collection of nifty gameplay mechanics (Needle 'n Thread, crawling, 3D movement, ledge climbing, pushing), Levana created this concept for a Double Jump mechanic. We're still unsure of this mechanic, and further concepts for the idea are being made... what do you think?

Halston mocked up a quick new concept for a Community Levels page, but, in his own words, "I don't like it". This is the great thing about concepts though - they display to us what does and doesn't work, with the latter being especially helpful when we didn't originally see a problem. They can open up a whole can of worms regarding cool edits, alternative ways to tackle an issue, and more.

As per usual, progress continued on our Cpt. Stuffy comic. We have ambitious plans for the comic, but we can't yet reveal them! 

A recent team development on the comic is that Ari is now exclusively working on the line work, and Carter is completing the shading and coloring! This could potentially allow for faster turnaround times and quicker story development!

Some brand-new animations were created this month for our little plush companion. A brand-new sliding animation was created, and an improved running animation too (thanks to public feedback). These were created by our lovely 3D Animators Brennan and Luke!

You can see these new animations below - though the first one has been heavily slowed down.

As displayed earlier, Halston had a bit of fun this month experimenting with shaders. In our quest to further the unique look of our game, Halston applied this toon shader effect. We think it looks pretty cool, but perhaps it would be too much to change the whole game to look like this? We'll have to see.

By combining two discussions into one, Halston created this 'low lives indicator' concept which uses shaders to make Stuffy blink when injured and their lives are running low. What do you think?

In other Stuffy-related news, our Lead Modeler Ozy imported the improved player model we mentioned in a previous Recapped! post. Though this currently exists on its own separate branch, he's already begun testing new animations and reworking broken cosmetics as part of the upgrade. 

As a bonus, Ozy also added rotation limits to Stuffy's head-tracking feature! Gone are the days of a possessed Stuffy rotating their head 180 degrees like an owl.

This month Halston worked on updating the aesthetics for the dropdown options in Build Mode! This new edit makes adding new options a breeze, and also brings it closer to the original concept! Further work will be done to add a pointer tail, as seen in the concepts from our previous Recapped! post.

Halston also tweaked some of the in-game hotkeys to look more like the original concepts and to bring the UI to a more cohesive place. So square! 🟪

And here is a little update for the pause menu as seen in Build Mode. This is running in-engine, whereas before it was just a concept! Another massive stride as we begin to fully piece together our little game.

You may remember us mentioning a large Build Mode UI overhaul in an earlier Recapped! post. More concepts were created this month to help solve UX-related questions, such as "what happens when our cursor toolbar is full?" and "How do we accommodate for tool overflow and support future additions?" 

Halston got to work on a solution, pitching a dropdown menu that creates 'cursor groups' where the player can find related or additional tools and cursors that otherwise wouldn't fit on the strip!

Halston also added a bit of polish to the Craftbook's popup label by creating a shadow effect on the tip!

Though we don't have a photo to accompany this news, this month we purchased a license for the aforementioned Amplify Shader Editor tool, along with a massive sound effect bundle that will help bring the game to life even further!

Stroofy on the Run - Luke

Stroofy and His Enormous Candy Basket - Luke

And there we go! Another extremely productive month for our Restitched team, who we couldn't be prouder of. As stated, there was more work accomplished this month, but we're not yet ready to share this with you!

Thank you so much for reading this month's Restitched: Recapped! See you in the next one!