Restitched: Recapped! | December 2022 (Patreon)

Happy New Year! And what a year 2022 was, hey? So many new developments were made, and we can't wait to see what 2023 brings us!

Before we get into 2023, let's take a look at what our developers got up to during the final month of 2022...

On December 6th we released a huge community survey to our Discord server. The survey consisted of four sections where we asked questions about Trixel Creative, Restitched, trixel+, and the survey-takers themselves.

We ended up with over 100 responses in 24 hours - way more than we expected! The survey data is already helping us better understand where we stand with our community, and the responses are already making an impact on how we tackle things. If you're one of the people that took part in the survey, thank you! Your voice matters to us.

This month we made a total of 81 commits to the code. It doesn't sound like a lot compared to previous months, but a lot of our developments this month took place outside of the code and are yet to be pushed (such as on separate branches) - not to mention many of us took time off for Christmas and New Year! Let's take a further look at these developments, shall we?

On December 11th our 3D Artist Cade shared progress on a Cement Bag prop. Looks heavy!

3D Artist Kyran took a dive into older assets in an effort to bring their texture quality up to the standards of our other Props. We also wanted to reduce the number of times the game's "Restitched" title is directly featured on in-game textures.

To help get us into the festive spirit, Kyran and Halston worked together to create a new 'Snow Mound' on December 17th to give some extra texture to wintery scenes!

And on December 22nd, Matt created this lovely logo-embossed Harmonica!

December 6th saw Santiago and Halston discussing Golden Stuffy and the shaders involved. With a bit of color and high metallic and smoothness sliders, Golden Stuffy was born.

After some further work on December 21st, Halston imported a crown into the game with some help from Ozy:

And remember Gummy Bear Stuffy from last month's Recapped? This is them now. Feel old yet?

Please note that we are still working on and experimenting with shaders - so these are definitely a work-in-progress!

...and of course, what's Christmas without a little Santa Paws?

Santiago has been working hard on bringing to life our very own Saint Nick, which we initially teased in last month's Recapped! Here's the original finished product, before further changes were made to the hat at Billy's request:

...and after!

Santiago wasn't quite sure which version of Santa Stuffy's boots to use, so they submitted two versions for a team vote:

Ultimately, we ended up deciding that the snow could be added with Stamps. In order to make the boots more general-purpose, they were changed to use a white tread instead:

After this progress, on December 17th, Snatxi furthered the festivities by posting this concept for a gift-wrapped Stuffy:

And on December 27th, Ozy updated Stuffy's Monkey outfit with some polish, which you can see below:

...further stating that the Cowboy outfit is next!

On December 1st, Michael shared a look at Restitched running on his new Mac. At this time, macOS and Linux share the same graphical issues. Our hopes are that sorting out one OS will fix the other, allowing us to easily optimize and release the game outside of Windows.

Just a few days later, Michael fixed the first macOS bug! His explanation of the issue was:

Unity doesn't treat Control as Command on macOS, and so what you need to do when creating a game for both PC and Mac is create two Keyboard/Mouse control schemes. ...If you're on a Mac, you block the PC KB/M scheme and allow the Mac one. In all other cases, you block the Mac one and allow the PC one.

On December 8th, Michael continued to make optimizations to the way things are highlighted and selected in the level editor:

1. Made it a player-owned script. This means multiple players can highlight objects for multiplayer support.

2. Set up a GetEditToolsNonAlloc method for LevelObjectMarker that makes an array and returns the number of edit tools it's able to fit in that array instead of getting the list of active edit tools.

3. Tied the LevelObjectHighlighter to the game's input system, allowing us to receive notifications when the cursor moves so that recasts occur only then, instead of every frame. This allows for additional room for a 3D recast, making the highlighter much more accurate.

4. Added core events to detect when things are moved or removed to create a solid ObjectHighlighter script.

...as long as the 2D prop colliders cover the mesh visually, then LevelObjectHighlighter will find the object and wake its 3D mesh collider. Then it'll continually raycast out to the 3D collider... Only then will it actually show the highlight. That way you get the performance benefits of not having 3D colliders on all the time, but the highlighter will still only highlight the object if it can actually be selected at that point. This kills more than a few birds with one stone...

On December 5th, Jayden added the voxel renderer component to Stuffy. This means lighting placed in the playable area will now accurately hit and cast shadows on them. Then, it was added to each cosmetic by following Ozy's advice and making the cosmetics part of our "bonemerge script".

This month we added a new Snow Splotch Stamp to the game, along with several other pending imports from previous months:

On December 1st, Jayden addressed an issue with crawling that caused Stuffy to get all confused about the direction they should be moving in. Jayden eventually figured this issue out though, stating:

Good news, I believe I have fixed the bug! The code for calculating slope angles was ever-so-slightly incorrect when crawling, so Stuffy thought they were on a slope. I'm not sure about Stuffy going vertical, but I think that was a bug that ended up getting solved somewhere in the 'stuffy-update' branch.

Further testing and head-scratching occurred on December 2nd when Halston and Michael tried to address the ongoing cursor detection and selection issues.

Some time ago, we created a new branch for the game called "group performance". This branch was originally intended to fix bugs with the grouping feature (which allows players to link multiple things and move them at once), however, digging into the code pulled back a curtain on major performance issues. As a result, the branch was then shifted into a months-long effort to restructure the way the game handles collision and detection.

The ongoing development of this branch has seen the addition of major bug fixes, performance improvements, and even a custom Prop collision editor for developers. Unfortunately, it has also brought a new obstacle into our path... selection inaccuracy.

Because we've removed old performance-heavy colliders on objects, the cursor now only detects the hitbox and not the mesh itself. Normally this is fine, except for the fact Restitched is basically built with 2D physics. This means cursor detection for highlighting and selecting is now only working on the front-most layer, essentially breaking things from being grabbed on the sides, and with a lot of inaccuracy too.

Michael has been exploring a variety of solutions to try and find a way forward while keeping our performance improvements. We've made progress on the issue, but nothing has yet restored the accuracy of the original method.

It's because it's misaligning the collision for the cursor. It's as if it's sensing it on the frontmost layer, even though the prop and its collision is in the back layer. - Halston

Somehow I need to figure out how to do a perspective-aware raycast - Michael

The collider is lined up with the center of the layer on the Z axis. Or it might be the front. Either way, it needs to be lined up with the back. That way raycasts to the side of the object will hit the back of it - Michael

This month we also identified an issue with the way Stamps are rendered on our custom material shader. We've reproduced the issue and found it only happens when Stamps are placed while the game is set to any graphics setting lower than High. We're still investigating the exact cause.

There are also several issues with Stuffy's animation blending and rotation math when it comes to sloped surfaces - and this is something we've touched on before. Stuffy currently lacks the tech needed to angle their body in a natural way when it comes to standing on steep surfaces. We've also found crawling and slipping to be quite buggy under specific conditions.

We've reproduced and documented these issues so they can be tackled soon! If working with Stuffy's player physics and gameplay sounds like your type of challenge, join us as a Programmer!

What would happen if we put that Gummy Bear shader onto a Material? Well, this exact thought popped into Halston's mind, and he decided to experiment. Here's a clip that Halston shared on December 15th:

The gummy bear shader was created with an experimental "melt" slider, which allows things to get all goopy. Unfortunately, using shaders to alter a mesh interferes with our custom voxel lighting solution and its shadows.

As stated, we're still just experimenting at this stage, but the potential that these shaders bring to the game is super exciting. 

Remember the new Prop textures shown earlier? Here are those improvements as seen in-game:

On December 20th, Halston created a new bevel style for Building Materials, internally called 'Hard Dip'. Perfect for wood and metal!

Further changes were also made to the new-and-improved Moon environment! Halston further adjusted the shading, color, and placement of background props.

...and made lots of suggestions on how to further polish backgrounds such as Rolling Acres and Haddock Harbour, while making some changes of his own:

Looping back to a much older discussion from before the Reveal Trailer, Halston and Ozy discussed expanding the borders of the Attic environment in a quick and crude mockup:

The idea is to expand the attic toward the screen so the Build Mode camera isn't able to see underneath the floor and outside of the walls. Because we've also scaled down the size of the attic a bit, we're left with a large empty strip near the top of the level. Our idea is to pad this with a dollhouse-like cut out of the roof then add a night sky and trees behind it, allowing for creators to use it as an additional backdrop!

As mentioned, the Santa outfit underwent a few rounds of feedback and constructive criticism, such as the hat being too stiff and curved. After feedback from Billy, Daniel stepped in for some quick concept art in order to get across the idea of a more relaxed hat.

Cpt. Stuffy's adventure is heating up! With the story growing heartier, there's never been a better time to jump in for a read!

On December 7th, Brennan shared a look at our new push-and-shove animations! Stuffy is quite excited to show off their temper!

On December 14th, Brennan refined the climbing animations, which now allow Stuffy to smoothly climb to the top of a Material or Prop after hanging from it.

On December 17th, Brennan further shared these animations of Stuffy pulling and straining when using the Needle 'n Thread!

At long last, we're here to reveal sideways ledge climbing! Though we showed ledge grabbing in our Reveal Trailer, we've always intended to expand it to other angles for maximum traversal and gameplay opportunities.

Here you can see Jayden's progress on repurposing climbing to work sideways!

Jayden and Halston had a lengthy discussion about how to handle ledge climbing, including whether or not to let the player cross to another climbing angle when at an intersection.

What else have we been up to regarding gameplay? Well, we've ditched Stuffy's sliding ability as it proved to be unfitting for our gameplay's pace. It also conflicted with crawling, and would overall not give value to the player's experience. Project Lead Halston provided a statement on the matter, saying:

When it comes to adding gameplay to Stuffy, we want to include movesets that are actually fun and useful. We're not interested in adding new player mechanics just for the sake of it. More isn't always better! Is it modular enough to work in many different player-made levels? If it can't be turned on/off manually and is a universal mechanic, then we must give careful consideration before adding it.

In this case, our previously-developed 'dashing/sliding' mechanic was determined to be unfitting and awkward to use, so we've removed it entirely. We still have many other exciting player mechanics, though!

Halston also discussed a few ideas for improving the Needle 'n Thread's features while Stuffy is grounded this month:

We've always had a clear goal of how the Needle 'n Thread mechanic should work, including detailed concepts and 2D animations of it in action. Unfortunately, even the most well-planned things don't always feel perfect in practice. We found certain functions of the Needle 'n Thread to either conflict with input for other mechanics, or just not feel good altogether.

Our 3D Render Artist Astro was especially busy this month, delivering two spectacular new graphics of Stuffy! The first of Stuffy sitting and playing with toy blocks, and the second of our Christmas render! Progress on the new Stuffy toy block render originally began in September, but it took a backseat for a while.

Look at that precious little baby... no thoughts, only block.

...and here's an in-progress shot by Astro as he set up the Christmas scene for rendering:

On December 20th, Halston shared a glimpse at his conceptual UI improvements for the level editor's Settings Panel popups:

"I'm intending to change the settings panel UI (finally), so there's less visual noise with the options. This also frees up some space vertically and makes it consistent with the newer UI style." - Halston

Two days later Halston completed the UI update while optimizing and reworking the color swatch selection (after feedback from other devs), as shown here:

Early in the month, we repurposed our dev server's outdated #resources channel into a #developer-guide. This new guide lays out all the important info that comes with being a developer and includes useful links as well.

On December 3, our Lead Writer Billy began new discussions regarding character dialogue options. We're all very eager for logic to properly make its way into the game, and have super exciting ideas on how to connect gameplay and story elements!

Just over a week later, Billy also suggested a "Real-time Sensor", allowing players to output a signal based on the time of day in real life.

Concerns were brought up, such as what happens with time zones, not allowing levels to be completable until certain times, etc. - it was ultimately decided that, to be consistent, it would follow the Lead Player's time, and would probably be best as a simple option in a Global Lighting Patch.

s q u i n t by Brennan

Unstitched by Halston

...and that's everything for December '22! Considering many of us took a break this month, we think December has been incredibly productive - and we can't wait to see what 2023 has in store!

See you next month for the first Restitched: Recapped! of the year!