Restitched: Recapped! | January 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, and welcome back to another Recapped! January was another extremely busy month for us. We've finally wrapped up our months-long restructuring of how collision is handled, added a load of backlog assets, created new developer tools, had discussions about core game mechanics, and so much more!

Without further ado, let's dive in!

This month we welcomed a new Trial Dev! Joseph is the latest programmer to join our team, and he's currently handling all things related to Stuffy and their mechanics!

Joseph: Hello! I'm mainly a backend programmer with a passion for game development. Most of the time you can find me working on modding Source Engine games, making Minecraft mods or working on my own game dev side projects.

We're still browsing applications, so we soon hope to bring in even more talent to sew Restitched together one thread at a time!

Want to become a part of our team? Check out our open positions here!

This month we made a staggering 865 commits to the source code of Restitched! That's the most amount of commits since we started Recapped back in November of 2021. In fact, the second-most amount was 713 back in April!

With this amount of commits, there's evidently been some big additions and changes to the code... so, let's see what happened!

While waiting for our massive performance and collision reworking, we've accumulated months' worth of models to be added to the game. Now that we've finally finished our super-handy custom collision editor (which you'll see later!), adding new Props is a lot easier and more accurate.

Our backlog of Props is too large to list, so here are just a few of the assets we've been working on:

On January 15th, Cade showcased his Skillet and Cooking Pot:

On January 25th we imported Snatxi's Message in a Bottle and Cone, as well as Cade's soil bag.

On January 27th, Kyran and Halston updated the Soil Bag, working on the model and texture respectively:

...and on January 30th, Matt showcased the CRT TV he's been working on!

This month saw the addition of several new Stamps. Among these were a Four Leaf Clover and Ornate Rosette Cog on January 2nd, and four different Modular Honeycombs - all by Carter!

On January 1st, Halston furthered our exploration into shaders by creating a glass material with refractive properties!

Halston: Refractive glass is now a shader we can use! We can set the refractive map, distortion intensity, normal map, and albedo color in the Unity inspector. This means we can customize the glass effect enough to make different materials like wavy glass, bumpy glass, frosted glass, etc. It could even be expanded upon in the shader graph to allow for certain parts to be refractive and others not.

On January 5th, we added a setting that allows creators to change the bevel type of any Building Material!

On January 31st, Halston imported eight new materials: Glitter, Wicker, Worn Wood, Worn Planks, Bamboo, Hologram, Shoji Screen, and Waffle.

A new material category was made for 'Food' for the new Waffle texture. Below is an image from when we were deciding on the default scale for it (we went with the left option).

Throughout the month, Halston also added more detail to the attic background. He's a busy bee, isn't he? You can now find the shelving filled with books, blueprints on desk surfaces, and changes were made to the lamps. Props were also optimized to be of lower texture quality given their distance. 

On January 18th, Jayden created the framework for our Outfits system. This allows us to save custom, preset outfits by assigning cosmetic IDs through a dev tool. We've also set up automatic photography, so any outfits we make will have their own auto-captured icon. 

Additionally, Jayden has built this system in such a way that will allow us to easily capture new icon images for anything else involving our plush friend!

This month, Gummy Stuffy received yet another update to its shader! There's now more natural refraction of light and the scene behind them. The edge lighting was also tweaked to look more natural.

Lastly, Snatxi started development on a lovely new musketeer outfit. For some reason, when wearing this, Stuffy likes to leave a 'Z' mark...

...and Billy called it 'Paws in Boots' 🐱

There's lots to unpack in the Technical Tinkers category this month!

On January 1st, we further polished the shaders for our glass materials. Currently, transparent materials don't play well with our custom lighting system. The best results were achieved by turning off both voxel and ambient occlusion (AO) but leaving default shadows on. AO is currently a global filter, so it may not be possible to turn it off per material. More work needs to be done on the voxel lighting to remove harsh black shadows when an opaque material is used.

As mentioned in a previous post, Lead Programmer Michael has spent the last several months restructuring a large part of how Restitched works. This change affects everything from the level editor to gameplay, and even to how we import assets. This was a massive undertaking with a lot of work involved (and a lot of unexpected issues), but the task has been fully wrapped this month! We've seen a noticeable performance boost to levels using a lot of assets and physics. 

Additionally, as part of this update, Michael has restructured the way game inputs are handled, making it easier and less limiting to work with. Previously we couldn't pan the camera while using certain tools or menus, but with the conflict of inputs out of the way, we can make the editor feel much more natural and modular.

We have also been working on a 'stuffy-update' branch for months. This branch of development was where we updated our Stuffy model (mentioned previously), fixed broken skins and cosmetics as a result of the change, added new animations, polished existing ones, fixed movement, made new player mechanics, added outfits, and more.

On January 8th, Michael came across a possible revelation while working on our collision system. Recent changes to the game have freed up new 'layers' in the engine, potentially allowing for support of up to 8 playable layers instead of 5. Further investigating and prototyping would need to be done, of course... but it's nice to know that this may be a possibility in the future!

To give an idea of what more playable space may look like, here is an old concept that not only displayed many additional layers but also an option to skew Materials and Props (though this feature ultimately proved to cause too many issues and was removed):

As mentioned above, with the merge of the 'group-performance' branch by Michael on January 17th, a new developer tool for importing assets became available. We can now manually draw and configure collision for any Prop in-game, which allows for more accurate physics interactions. Dev tools like these make our lives a lot easier, and the work can be done a lot faster. We've already gone through all Props in-game and remade their collision... manually!

The next day, on January 18th, Michael began work on the previously-showcased Editor Notes concept! This is a feature that will allow players to create a note anywhere in the level editor. Though it's not pretty just yet, you can view some of the very early progress below:

...and to recap, here is the original concept from August 2022:

There were a lot, and we mean a lot, of bugs that were identified and tackled this month - most of which stemmed from our restructuring of the game. We can't possibly cover all of them here, but here are a few of the more notable ones! 

on January 6th, we discovered some clipping issues. Changes in how gameplay geometry is handled resulted in broken material cutting. The method we used to fix material cutting/merging bled over to our Props system, which should behave differently. Here we show that Props can be placed inside each other because the placement brush no longer considered the gameplay geometry.

Changes to the way gameplay collision works also produced bugs with Stuffy's layer movement. Restitched works with collision more like a 2D game, so there are a variety of techniques we use to sense obstructions going forward or backward. In this case, these were broken temporarily for thin materials.

Before our big merge of the game-restructuring branch, we had to iron out several significant issues that were caused as a side effect. One of these issues involved our grid system no longer aligning or behaving accurately, as discovered on January 11th. While trying to fix this, we found that the grid visuals were now being parented to the center of each levelobject when it should be shown in front of them.

While squashing bugs with our lighting system, Michael discovered a memory leak on January 12. To no surprise, he subsequently fixed it just 40 minutes later!

On January 13th, Halston discovered another bug related to Stuffy's detection. As mentioned earlier, Restitched uses collision similar to a 2D game. This means Stuffy's movement between layers is more visual than practical. As such, Stuffy is able to stop at any point when there's an open floor surface and is not bound to layer slots. If you attempt to walk into the side of a thin material from the right depth, Stuffy doesn't detect it from the front or back. This was a recent oversight and will require certain techniques to fix.

We also discovered, on January 27th, that the Needle 'n Thread indicator was broken after a branch merge occurred. The indicator UI was only showing up toward the front-most layer and not Stuffy's actual position. This bug was quickly squashed by lead exterminator Michael.

There were lots of developments on Stuffy's animations this month, too! On January 1st, Ozy tested out a new run cycle and animation blending after Luke's update to it in December:

...and below, you can see some of the animations that Luke worked on from January 29th until the 31st, consisting of jumping, dancing, and flexing! Luke also commented how some animations (such as the dancing one below) still need some further work.

On January 31st, Brennan worked on updating the ledge climbing animation. This animation is likely to be changed entirely so that shimmying is only possible if there's a place to brace your feet on the surface.

This month, animation style and times were tweaked for dropdown menus, making things more responsive and lively. Settings Panels were further polished, and a new concept was made to explore how to nest settings sections without creating endless pages.

For example, on January 7th, a new settings panel type called 'roller widget' was added. This works like the 'toggle widget' but lets us cycle through a variety of options instead of just two. Below are a few concepts of how we wanted this to look, but we ultimately went for something like the far right.

Here is Jayden showcasing the new roller widget for the (also new) bevel settings! Clicking tiny arrows isn't always practical when in a rush, so rest assured you can simply left-click to go forward or right-click to go back.

On January 18th, we had a brief discussion about UI sound effects. While we already have sounds implemented into the UI, Jayden and Billy shared some other UI sound effects that they thought had a lovely vibe. Here's a look into that conversation:

On January 25th, a concept for the Steam Workshop in-game overlay was created, iterated on, and finalized to be prototyped.

We know how important and integral the Workshop is in-game. We want it to be easy and natural to browse and play online levels, so we've experimented with various concepts!

The idea is to have one central UI window that can pop up from any area of the game. The experience would be tailored to the area of the game you're using: if you're building a level and want a car that someone else has made, you could potentially open the overlay and find one. If you're at the main menu and want to find levels to jump into, you could open it and see only levels. If you're in the wardrobe, maybe you could find outfits other people have uploaded!

For now, though, we're only focusing on level browsing - as shown below:

This is a huge topic of discussion for us, and one we plan to iterate on much more. For now, enjoy these concepts of the direction we're headed, as well as some screenshots of the developers discussing this new concept.

On January 26th, Leon shared some progress on the new Build Mode toolbar. As mentioned in a previous Recapped, we're moving cursors out of the craftbook and into a quick-and-easy toolbar. This is our first task toward the fully-redesigned level editor UI.

As per usual, further work was made this month towards our monthly Cpt. Stuffy comic! We ran into a bit of an issue this month, as unfortunately there was an export error that neither artist had encountered before. This error made it so that the first panel in the .psd file (which Ari uses to create the line work) was non-existent when imported into Clip Studio Paint (which Carter uses for coloring). Thankfully, Ari and Carter worked together to get this solved through trial and error, and progress could resume.

On January 17th, Halston proposed sub-categories in Settings panels. Here's a little insight into the conversation the developers had:

Halston: I feel this is easy to understand for any player, and it's also easier for us to make both on a technical and art level. This approach basically reuses prefabs already in the game but in a new setup. Pages are something we've needed for ages. As we grow the game with new options, we're quickly cluttering the settings panel list.

Billy: Love it. Maybe change the 'Return to Categories' so as to not have an image - and have the arrow on the left side of the panel instead? Otherwise, it looks like another category to enter. Also, I think it would be neat to literally place the secondary page on top of the primary one (though darkened), but a little off-set - then it would make it clear that the user is in a secondary page. Make it appear more like pages in an actual book.

From January 19th, the discussion for enemies and general gameplay flow was re-ignited. We've always had a unique vision for the game and an expectation of its gameplay structure. Building upon this, our Project Lead (Halston), Lead Writer (Billy), and Lead 3D Artist (Ozy) had an in-depth discussion about how we want combat to feel and which enemy types we hope to see - including how they might work together with Stuffy's moveset.

Furthermore, Halston and Billy had in-depth discussions about the enemies within the Story levels, and how they can be utilized while also being user-friendly for Build Mode.

On January 27th, Billy proposed a 'Profile Picture Pack' for Restitched and Cpt. Stuffy - potentially releasing a new profile picture every month for trixel+ subscribers.

Also this month, we discussed some changes that could be made to the default background, such as ambient sounds and other set pieces:

As a result of this conversation, we've changed the skybox for the default background. It now has a more natural, vibrant color depending on the time of day. Shadows and light intensity were also tweaked. The moon is visible at night, a sunset-type look is now possible, and daylight has clouds.

Funhouse Mirror - Halston

Bath Time - Halston

Peeping Stuffy - Halston

Thank you so much for reading this month's Recapped! It's been a big ol' month for our devs, who continue to bring brilliant things to this project. We hope our dedication and passion for this project shine through in these features. What has been your favorite addition this month? Let us know in the comments!

See you next month for another Recapped!