Restitched: Recapped! | February 2023 (Patreon)

All aboard the Recapped train as it chugs through a quick February! We're keeping some stuff(y) under wraps this month. After all, we must keep some things a secret!

With that said, let's take a look at February's development progress...

On February 17th we took a look at some data from our Steam page, such as our follower chart. You can see below that we steadily rose after revealing the Steam listing for Restitched. Naturally, our sharpest climb was after the Reveal Trailer in July 2022! We currently have 2,625 followers on Steam.

We're looking forward to showing the game again and hopefully growing this number even further.

After weeks of preparation and last-minute additions, we finally compiled and pushed a new internal Steam build on February 19th. This is the first substantial update we've put out since our reveal trailer premiered last year. These builds are used by developers (such as artists) who don't use the Unity engine.

Finally, as some of you may know, our Lead Programmer Michael has a rare genetic disorder called Retinitis-Pigmentosa that renders him legally blind, and he's been waiting to be accepted into a clinical trial that would potentially preserve his vision for longer. This month he's finally been accepted for surgery!

Michael's operation is scheduled for next month (March). We're so excited that he's been granted this opportunity and hope you will join us in wishing him a successful surgery and speedy recovery.

Because Michael is the butter to Restitched's bread, we will likely see temporarily slow progress on the programming aspect of the game as he recovers. We expect him to return to development whenever he's ready, and no sooner!

If you'd like to know more about Michael and how he works on Restitched with his condition, you can look forward to the next Trixel Diary called "Michael's Story", which will be making its way to trixel+ this month!

This month we had over 100 commits to the Restitched codebase. As stated previously, this was a rather quiet month as our team took a breather from January's biggest-yet development spree. There is, of course, a lot we want to keep under wraps too!

3D Artist Kyran began improving the textures of some of our older Prop models such as the Kerosene Lantern. Isn't it lovely?

On the 24th, Cade showed off several key models. You might see these appear in the level editor, backgrounds, and maybe even Stuffy's hands!

Kicking off February, Halston continued last month's effort to import new Building Materials. Below are 26 new textures that have been added to the game! Do these spark any inspiration for your future builds?

On February 6th, we imported several props featured in previous Recapped posts!

Also, on February 6th, Daniel showcased new developments in his conceptualization of a "Mailbear Man" outfit for Stuffy! That's right, Mom, Stuffy has a real job now!!

On the 21st, Jayden continued the development of the Outfits page for the Wardrobe menu as touched upon in last month's Recapped. Developers can now set custom icons in place of an auto-generated Stuffy image, which will be super useful when showcasing our original outfits!

On February 4th, Michael added support to edit the values of multiple lights at once. This is useful for cases where you multi-select two objects that share the same settings and wish to adjust them both with one menu.

Before we can continue with our big level editor UI redesign, we first have to shift some things around internally. For example, the new cursor toolbar (shown below) will need to be decoupled from the main Craftbook in order to work properly. Progress on that properly began this month!

Michael continued his development on the "Editor Notes" feature, which allows creators to place reminders, instructions, and checklist items anywhere in their levels. The latest development on this feature involved adding an icon and title to the design.

Stuffy has the ability to maneuver through a scene seamlessly, including backward and forwards. Even though Restitched is based on mostly 2D physics interactions, we try to treat the character as if they're 3D for ease of traversal.

One thing we find difficult sometimes is how you can't always predict how far you're jumping backward or where you'll land. In an effort to combat this, on February 18th, Ozy took on the task of adding a drop shadow projector.

You'll often see this technique in 3D platforms. It currently has issues to iron out, but we'll continue tweaking and testing it to make sure it's the right way forward for Stuffy!

In other news, Halston changed the Ambient Occlusion (AO) method so that lighting presents more realistically. This form of AO is a post-processing method applied based on screen space. We also have a custom and performance-friendly AO method that applies to Materials, Props, and anything physical in the gameplay zone - though this needs more work to reduce harshness, add smoothness, etc.

You can see the changes below - most noticeably on the wall panels, material crevice, and behind the soup can.

Our marvelous animators cooked up more animations this month. On February 17th, Brennan finished the animation for Stuffy's sideways climb, which is only visible in gameplay if there's enough spacing for Stuffy's feet on a surface.

...and on February 27th, Joseph began implementing support for Stuffy to hold the needle. Since this GIF below, there were several developments made to the feature such as the size of the needle. The needle will only appear when Stuffy is near something interactive, such as a threadable Prop or Building Material.

While testing out the latest Steam build on the 20th, Carter made a lovely scene to experiment with the level editor and Stuffy.

February 21st saw Joseph continuing the work on a pulling mechanic for the Needle 'n Thread feature, though further animation work is needed. This is a super cool gameplay mechanic that allows Stuffy to interact with materials from a distance - such as over gaps and platforms. Pair it with the 'Pushable' setting, and Stuffy can push and pull things!

At the very beginning of the month, Halston renamed some of the level editor tools. The 'Vertex Editor' is now the 'Shape Tool', while 'Group Editor' was changed to 'Grouping Tool' (though, the Grouping Tool will soon be obsolete with the addition of a multi-select feature). We made this change to simplify what each tool means and keep a consistent naming theme. We feel that players may not be as familiar with "vertexes" and how that factors into material editing. This new name aims to be more of a 'game' term than a technical one!

On the 22nd, Halston continued work on the Settings Panel UI, including an update to the sliders. Formerly these were looser and more sketched-looking, but we find this to be out of place with our latest design changes.

We wanted to consider more space for dragging the mouse, which would allow for more granular control of the value. Unfortunately, this comes at a sacrifice of space, so we had to experiment with different layouts to move the number around.

By popular demand, we added a Stuffy 'pog' emote to the Discord server, courtesy of Luke!

it's pretty pog tbh

Got Milk? - Luke

1 Stuffillion Tickets - Luke

And there we have it! Those are just some of the exciting developments we've made this month towards Restitched! What do you think? Is there anything that's got you particularly excited to get your hands on the game?

See you next month for another Restitched: Recapped!