Restitched: Recapped! | May 2023 (Patreon)

Welcome back to another Restitched: Recapped! May has been a somewhat different kind of month as most of our developments took the form of discussions and documentation. There's still a lot of content to show, though, so let's dive right in!

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As a result of our developments mostly being discussion-based, only 65 commits were submitted in May. Regardless, here's a little peak into the commit comments:

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On May 18th, Matt showcased some further developments on the background we've teased in previous Recapped! posts! The location is beginning to look a lot more recognisable now, so we've held back on visually showing this progress for the time being!

On May 20th, Cade showcased his completed Antique Radio for our Attic Atelier background!

...and on May 28th, Cade showed some progress on his Guitar asset!

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There's lots to show off for the wardrobe this month! On May 12th, Daniel created this lovely gif to show off the conceptual pride shirts and face paints on Stuffy!

On the same day, Daniel showcased these lovely concepts, too:

Remember the Masked Mage outfit from the developer livestream last year? Well, this month Snaxti was finally able to complete the texture work required. Here's the finished result!

We can't wait to get started on the other winning entries!

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To start the month off, on May 1st, Michael implemented the ability to change the time of day within the Craftbook! This has previously only been possible via the developer menu. Additionally, some further tweaks by Michael now mean that the level will now also apply the same lighting settings after changing the background, too. This is a big step as it means the game is becoming more and more 'self-contained', as it were. The more we implement features into the game itself, the more we can continue to refine and enhance the gameplay experience.

On May 4th, Michael began to implement our checkpoint system. Checkpoints are currently planned to be invisible in-world, and displayed more so as UI elements. Due to some technical limitations at the moment (since checkpoints are Props, they have the same rules as Props), we've had to use a mesh to represent the Checkpoint - and, for this, Michael has picked a basic mesh of Stuffy themselves.

Our Lead Programmers Ozy and Michael have also been working intensely under the hood to ensure that our gameplay runs smoothly and efficiently. A new input system has been created, which allowed Ozy to make the following revelation:

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On May 12th, Halston went through and detailed lots of little bugs that appeared when testing gameplay. He further commented that "other than a few oddities and existing bugs, things are feeling pretty good".

Here, if Stuffy attaches onto a climbable surface, they are able to then shuffle onto non-climbable ones:

Here it's clear that Stuffy is able to move a little too far to the edge of a climbable surface:

This issue pertains to Needle 'n Thread momentum, where Halston stated: "some type of momentum on N&T is still wrong or doesn't exist, making it impossible to cross gaps like this":

And here, Stuffy is standing upon a material set as 'slightly slippery', though it's not affecting Stuffy's movement at all:

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There is lots to show this month from our animators! On May 5th, Brennan began to play around with some low-health Stuffy animations! Here's an idle animation:

...and here's a running animation!

As we continue to work on the checkpoint and respawning aspect of the game, Brennan made some nifty re-spawning animations, which he shared on May 10th:

But it doesn't stop there! On the final day of the month, Luke showcased this new death animation that utilised some new animation techniques!

Please note: no Stuffies were harmed in the making of these animations (...we think).

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As we continue to refine elements of gameplay, this month Ozy worked on the strength of Needle n' Thread. Here you can see this in action, with smaller objects being pulled with ease and larger objects requiring a bit more oomph:

On May 9th, a discussion was had about hazards and damage, with questions such as 'When we damage or kill Stuffy, how do we set these parameters?'

We set about exploring ways to go about implementing damage levels to items in-game, with Halston stating:

My thought is to add a new category of settings to the elements in Prop and Material datasets. In the Unity Inspector menu, we could see a damage slider. If it's zero (by default) then it gives no damage. If it's 100 then it's insta-kill.

We should also be able to set the kill style. Could this be done in the same way we select material bevels, physics, material classifications, etc.? If so, we could create a new entry for each death type. This would decide which animation Stuffy plays, which sound effects are triggered, and how long to wait before we respawn the player after death (drowning may take longer than dissolving, for example).

There was lots of talk with our lead programmers and artists as to how to set about this task. Ozy chimed in by stating:

I’ll have to do a bit more research but generally, I notice games will either change the shader at runtime or make it a shader that supports the other effects, it’ll require more research to see how we can make it work in the scope of this game since we’d need custom shader support most likely in order to still use voxel lighting and stamps

As far as making it so Stuffy's feet actually have effects on it (goo, burnt, etc) there are a handful of techniques but I think a mask shader that keeps in mind how far Stuffy is into the material would work best, almost like overlaying an extra texture and have that fade out over time likely with an alpha texture

and Raphael added:

In terms of work, for each of these options, we need to add settings in our dev tools (materials and props), expose them to players, implement them in our character controller, and implement the art (animations, shaders).

There is a lot more to this discussion than we'll reveal here, but here's a useful outline that was created for developers to reference when implementing the features:

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On May 4th, Halston tweaked his concept for the upcoming Build Mode Craftbook redesign, stating: "After checking the screen size, I've realized that increasing the new UI's row count to 16 instead of 15 is best for the number of items we have. This could be even smaller for Stamps if we prefer." Here's a before and after:

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Those of you subscribed to trixel+ may have noticed that Cpt. Stuffy took a short break in April. This was to allow us to become month ahead and therefore consistently put out Cpt. Stuffy pages on time. Here's a sneak-peak into June's Cpt. Stuffy page!

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On May 11th, with the discussion of checkpoints and re-spawning ongoing, Halston shared this concept of a player running past a checkpoint in-game. As you can see, this is all UI-based and a visual representation of added health appears.

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Stuffy slept past their 7am alarm and just woke up at 10am - Luke

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Thank you for reading this month's edition of Restitched: Recapped! There are already some exciting developments that we can't wait to show you in July! See you then!