Restitched: Recapped! | April 2023 (Patreon)

Welcome back to another Restitched: Recapped! This month brings a bit of a smaller entry as our Project Lead Halston took April off for personal leave, and our Lead Programmer Michael underwent recovery from his operation for the first part of the month. Still, we've had a fairly productive period and would like to share our latest developments with you!

This month we formally welcomed back the talented programmer, Raphaël. Stepping back into the Lead Programmer role alongside Michael, Raphaël is considered a 'founding father' of the game on a technical level and was responsible for many of the game's major and central features in its early development. We're very excited to have him back on board after his venture into the games industry, and can't wait to see what he'll get up to in Restitched next!

On the 15th of April, we guest-starred on Cubold Gaming's 'Cubold Cast' podcast to discuss the development of Restitched, as well as Trixel Creative as a whole. We revealed some brand-new details such as the name of Stuffy's owner that they are searching for throughout the story, some gameplay mechanics, and even some insight into our development process.

If you've not seen it already, you can watch it on YouTube by clicking here, or listen to it on Spotify by clicking here! The runtime is 1 hour and 43 minutes.

This month we made a total of 656 commits to the code. Well, technically we made around 1,000 more than that - but only as a result of merging all of our branches, as we'll discuss later!

This month, Matt continued his amazing work on a new level background! Keep your guesses coming in as to where this background is. All of your guesses so far have been great, but no one has correctly guessed yet!

On April 22nd, Cade showed off his progress for a new Spray Can and Spray Can Lid, which you can see below:

We're a little biased, but we love the color! 🤷‍♀️

On April 24th, Ozy showed off the new boat-swaying animations for the Haddock Harbour environment, created by Matt. You can see the boats bobbing and swaying with the tide below, bringing an element of liveliness to the theme:

From April 5th, Kevin worked more on the Baseball Cap cosmetic for Stuffy, and on April 23rd, Ozy imported it into the game!

We’ve previously discussed our plans to incorporate texture swatches for both Props and Cosmetic Items, and this cap is planned to support that functionality completely.

On April 8th and April 16th, Kevin showcased another concept that was realized - Bag Head! Thankfully, Stuffy doesn’t need to breathe, so there’s no choking hazard here.

This is still a work in progress, and we can expect more developments to take place soon!

This month the game got a huge update as we merged a lot of our smaller development branches into the main one. This resulted in over 1,000 commits being made to the game (as mentioned earlier), and a lot of head-scratching being made as we ironed out errors.

On April 9th, Lead Programmer Raphaël decided that he was going to do some spring cleaning on the project, stating: "There are a lot of dangling bits, not least the 400 warnings in our codebase, and the Unity errors we're seeing." Additionally, on April 18th, there were some discussions regarding Multiplayer, and how some aspects would work. We set about establishing that local multiplayer would be a more limited experience, but that we would like online multiplayer to be properly fleshed out.

There is a whole lot that goes on behind-the-scenes to get the game running as efficiently as possible, while still allowing for the features that we want to implement. Keep your eyes peeled for future Dev Diaries that focus on specific areas of programming, where we'll go a lot more in-depth on the technicalities!

On April 12th, Luke showcased some of his new 'Cosmetic Equip' animations, which you can see below:

These have since been imported into the game by Ozy, and really help to bring our little plush friend to life when styling them out.

On April 14th, Michael shared some progress on the Build Mode UI. We've shared before that we're working on a toolbar at the top of the screen. This is one small, but promising step into a bigger transition that will restyle the entire level editor interface.

On April 21st, Michael enabled support for Active Highlights, as well as drop-down implementation.

The image below shows the active selection via highlight. The overall color, spacing, and sizing aren't looking quite right. This will all be addressed soon by our UI designer once the features are functional.

The image below may just look like some white rectangles, but it's more than that. There's a lot of work that has been completed behind the scenes to make these properly functional. While they're not pretty yet, you can see the progress below!

There were also developments this month for supporting menus and... the rest of the game! At the moment, when you boot up the game, it goes straight into the editor. This isn't how the final game will be presented, and Michael got to work on adding Main Menu support.

Regarding this update to QuickActions, Michael stated to the team:

"This changes how Restitched boots up in-editor. When set to Main Menu, it behaves like a standalone build should - you get booted into main menu. When set to classic, it behaves like you're used to. This is the default."

Before we began building the main menu, we had a placeholder one implemented. Here's a look at it in-game:

...and here's a look at what the menu is shaping up to be, after some initial developments from Michael:

It's important to note that this progress is based on an early concept for a main menu and may include options and naming that have since changed.

There were also a lot of developments for WorldManager this month - but they're a bit too techy to showcase properly in this post! Again, keep your eyes peeled for future programming entries of Restitched: Dev Diary! 👀

Did someone say... Logic? On April 23rd, Michael re-visited this much-anticipated feature, and while there's not much in the way of new developments this month, Michael regained familiarity with his code in anticipation of future developments.

On April 11th, Composer Thomas showcased a track titled "Catastrophe Climber", stating:

"Catastrophe Climber, a drum-heavy, pre-boss song. Imagine the most challenging sections in the game right before the boss. It contains multiple toms, percussion, brass, a choir and an organ."

Perhaps we'll get to hear this in a Soundtrack Preview post one day!

...and that's all for April! As we said, it was a fairly shorter month (some of you will know we were originally going to merge this month's with May's), but we decided to go forward with this post because - ultimately - these are meant to show what development is like and, sometimes, your months are a little quieter than usual.

See you next month for another exciting Restitched: Recapped!