Restitched: From The Vault | Early Production Captures (Patreon)

Welcome to another 'From The Vault' post! This month we're pulling out very early screenshots from Restitched's initial production stages.

Piecing Everything Together

When first putting the game into development, we started by discussing, conceptualizing, and creating basic models so that we could compile everything in-engine and get a better idea of how the game will shape up. 

Below is one of the first-ever images of the game, which dates back to 2020. You'll notice a lack of polished lighting alongside a mint-colored skybox. Also featured is our early Stuffy model wearing the bee outfit (one of the first outfits we ever made)!

Even though the character had no animations and a barebones physics system, putting everything together helped us to see which ideas worked well or not. This, of course, is also a necessary step to lay the foundation for future development.

As a staggering comparison, this is what the same scene in the game looks like two years later:

Just from this screenshot you can clearly see the progress made to improve lighting, shadows, textures and character animations - not to mention everything else we've worked on for the past two years!

Lights, Camera, Action!

Here's another early development find! This is a screen capture of when we began setting up the player camera. Our artists wanted to help visualize the world of Restitched while our programmers were still busy making things work!

What Tofu?!

Was that first screenshot not early enough? Well, this one is even earlier! 

Do you see that small tofu-like wedge sitting on those stairs? Well... that's Stuffy. That's right... before Stuffy was modeled and imported into the game, we used this white block (which we called 'Tofu') to fly around the scene and hop up surfaces; testing physics collision and the scale of the scene from a player's view.

This is, of course, an extremely primitive version of the farm background, featuring only an untextured blockout of the tractor and a tree, a blank skybox, some experimental grass, and unfinished terrain... but it does mean that the Farm setting actually predates Stuffy!

This version of the game was used primarily to test the Building Material brushing system and time of day values (as shown by the '10' text in the upper left corner). It helped us to figure out important calculations and user controls, and also get a sense of how Stuffy may navigate around a level.

The image below is from April 6th, 2020, and is the first-ever screenshot of Stuffy in-game! It predates the image above, but we continued to use Tofu for testing as we were still fully implementing the Stuffy character. You can see yet another early version of the farm background, with a very old Stuffy model T-posing next to their Tofu predecessor.

If you'd like to go even earlier and see the first screenshot of Restitched ever, well... that's not actually in the Vault! In fact, it's in our 'First Steps' Dev Diary. It's not explicitly stated which one is the first, but it is in there. Can you guess which one it is? 🧐

...and that's all for this month! Thanks for catching up on another Restitched: From The Vault! See you next time!