Restitched: Recapped! | June 2023 (Patreon)

Welcome back to another Restitched Recapped! This month we tackled a plethora of things from sound effects and rubber ducks to particles and animations! Let's dive right in, shall we?

Pride Month is an extremely important month for us here at Trixel Creative. To celebrate the occasion, we released a new graphic and statement. To see the process behind the creation of this new graphic, read on!

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In July of 2023, we made a total of 65 new commits to the code. If you're wondering why these commits seem lower than before, it's because we no longer work on individual branches. All of our work is now directly committed to the main branch, so duplicates caused by submitting to a private branch and then re-submitting to the main branch are no longer skewing the results. 

A lot of our developments this past quarter have also been focused on research and design, rather than direct developments of features. For example, we've been meticulously planning and charting our lives and death systems so that implementing them will be a breeze.

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On June 7th, we added ducks! That's right - it's taken us three years, but we've finally added the feature that you've all been requesting. To confirm: you can now place ducks in your level, and we look forward to your quacking creations!

On June 9th, Cade showcased his progress on texturing the Guitar prop that was featured in last month's entry. Since this was posted, the acoustic hole in the center was made black to make it pop and appear hollow.

On June 19th, Matt shared his progress on sculpting a Lucky Cat prop. It looks a bit like clay at the moment - a result of the sculpting process - but textures will be added once the sculpting is complete.

On the 20th of June, Cade shared the image on the left of a new Banana Prop. Since posting this, Cade received feedback from Ozy (who requested more polygons) and Billy (who requested a more matte texture), as well as “tweaking the areas that needed more work”, resulting in the image on the right.

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On June 2nd, Matt further worked on the top-secret background that was shared a few Recapped! posts ago. There's been more detailed modeling and texturing this month, but we still want to keep it a mystery! Does the below screenshot sprout any further ideas for the location? 🤔

On June 5th, Halston began sorting through each Building Material and determining whether they would be needed in the game (as in, other textures could be used with a different color palette to achieve a similar effect) or if they needed any further work. For example, Halston pointed out the following for having textures that are too large:

The Attic background is our most completed background so far... and for good reason. It is potentially the most important as it's the first background that players will see as they progress through the story. As we begin to refine this space, Daniel proposed the following concept update, stating: 

I think we can hide the sides of the house with some pine trees perhaps. I'm not exactly sure of how far the camera is able to pan out.

Halston responded by stating:

…ideally the roof would angle toward the camera so we avoid those edges, but this is an amazing reference. It would just be about rotating it 90°, but I don’t think a concept for [that] angle is necessary. We can see the goal and art style here, so adapting the edges to not show the sky shouldn’t be too complicated.

On June 5th, Ozy imported the Santa outfit that was featured in December's Recapped! post:

Santa Paws has been taking some time off, so we're happy to see that they've finally visited Restitched ahead of the Holiday 2023 season!

On June 5th, Halston re-opened the 'Particles and Sounds' thread in the development server, with these concepts from an earlier stage in development being shared:

This spurred discussion between developers as to how these would be tackled. Responding to the second image, Ozy stated:

The needle hitting something can likely use a sort of check between the desired area the needle is gonna hit and where the needle actually is. Maybe when the needle projectile hits the area it can fire off an event/function - that way we don't need to use physics calculations. Otherwise, we can just do a simple physics calculation - depending on what the programmers would prefer. When it hits, just have it fire an audio cue and have it spawn particles at that area of contact. It's just simply instantiating a particle prefab most likely.

Our goal is to make the game look good and feel even better. By adding special animation events, particles, shader effects, and sounds, we hope to make the world around Stuffy feel alive and reactive. When you thread into certain materials, what if small pieces of it break away on impact to give you a 'tactile' response? What if subtle debris kicks up from your feet when running on specific material types? We hope these polish effects will make features more satisfying to see and use - though, they will come later in development as they are purely polish goals.

Michael implemented the flipping feature for Props on June 8th, declaring:

HEY. FLIPPING WORKS ON EXISTING THINGS. Well, local positions in a group get thrown out of whack, but there's a way to fix that (it involves changing how groups are created).

A few days later, on the 14th, Michael further implemented a feature so that the smear brush now supports scaling and rotating during brushing. This is super hard to show in a screenshot, but here's what Michael sent to the development server after implementing the feature:

As you can see, the shape gets bigger the more Michael is smearing toward the right. Unfortunately, we have disabled this feature as it creates an array of unexpected issues. We've decided that the same effect can be achieved through other tools and techniques, and so excluding this "quality of life" feature will have no effect on creative potential. This is still on our internal roadmap, so having it return in the future is never out of the question!

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Following on from his reporting of several smaller issues in May, this month Halston shared more detailed reports of issues with gameplay and also documented them on the project's Trello page while tagging the relevant people:

On June 15th, we discovered that creating a straight line with the brush tool was actually creating several corners which shouldn't have been created:

Michael tackled this the very same day, fixing the issue and sharing the screenshot below to display his work:

After tackling one issue that was reported last month, Halston further discovered that the fix was causing another issue, stating "the stuffy dropdown fix is preventing the player from returning to the frontmost layer". This was added to the list of issues to fix.

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As we continue our foray into hazards, our animators have begun creating the visuals for Stuffy's interactions. On June 9th, Brennan shared progress  for the 'sticky walk' and 'drowning' animations:

Brennan stated he believes further work needs to be made here, stating "I don't know what I should change to improve [sticky walk]" and asking for suggestions. He also stated that he was "thinking of having his arms flail more" for the drowning animation, too.

Responding to these, Luke stated:

I think it's the torso/waist on both of them. It's completely stiff when usually the waist is the pivot of all weight of the body. Maybe for sticky walk have his hips wade from side to side and have a bit of a heavy rebound with every step with the waist.

After some work, Brennan shared this update the same day:

He's really putting his all into getting across that sticky surface!

Keeping to the theme, on June 17th Luke committed the worst crime imaginable when he shared the following animation with the team:

We'd like to again state that no Stuffy plushies were harmed in the making of any animations...

Brennan later shared some more animations he'd been working on, but we have to keep some surprises!

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As previously teased, Ozy implemented several of the developers' long-awaited feature of being able to scale the Needle n' Thread. This opens a lot more opportunities for level design, and our level designers have been having a lot of fun creating unique scenes to test out Stuffy's gameplay mechanics!

The animation below is added simply to get the feature working. Further polish is planned in the near future!

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As we continue to refine the game on our way toward the Alpha milestone, we're beginning to nitpick smaller aspects beyond just the main features that we wish to implement. On June 5th, Halston displayed how "there's an awkward lack of animation when Stuffy is attached to something", stating "we don't want to pull or strain yet, so when idle and attached, could we reuse a piece of the pull/strain animations to just look like they're holding the thread?"

Ozy took notes and communicated his plans to do just that.

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On June 5th, Halston shared the following updates that he had made to the Build Mode UI:

I've polished the toolbar, though it needs another icon to match the original concept and have proper spacing. I've removed the stitched border from the top-left buttons. They were cute, but right now I feel it's too much visual clutter. I've  also changed the scale of a bunch of things to be smaller, because in fullscreen mode (on various resolutions) the UI looks massive.

During Halston's spree of UI polish, he also made other noticeable changes such as centering the 'Controls Row' shortcuts at the bottom of the screen, improving the dropdown menu designs, replacing certain icons for better clarity, changing tool icons, and asset names, designs and more.

On June 8th, Michael separated the toolbar function icon and Craftbook function button icon variants, saying "the Craftbook one is now Wardrobe Function Icon Button Variant". 

In other words: Adding the toolbar (top center) required us to piggyback off the Craftbook itself. Naturally, these are two separate menus with their own respective sizes and functions. They formerly shared a prefab, meaning that our "Reset Outfit", etc. icons in the Wardrobe page would copy the size of whatever our Toolbar icons use. Michael has separated these so they can now be designed independently of one another.

Following this, Halston tweaked some of the visuals and "swapped some icons too". Below is the image Michael shared when he implemented this change:

And on June 15th, Halston "made a controversial change, but it might not be permanent." - "The row count and size of the material icons were condensed, so more content fills the screen at once." further stating:

I have a big issue with scale when I design. I've never felt great at guessing it. When I go full-screen or use Steam builds, I can't help but notice how massive some things are compared to the cursor. I like this change for Props, and it's always been this way for Stamps. I'm unsure about Materials, but in full screen, they're still perfectly visible in detail and easier to browse. This change also accidentally fixed a bug where swapping between pages with different icon/row sizes would cause a stutter effect where they take a second to read.

Below you can see the new icon size and spacing for Building Materials, allowing more content to be seen at once as our library of content grows:

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This month, the Cpt. Stuffy page for July was completed! Here's a section of the rough outline that our artist Ari put together on June 8th:

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From June 5th to June 22nd, Halston shared some concepts for a new label UI element that would appear under certain scenarios.

The first would appear when:

…hovering the eyedropper over Objects. This way we can see their Craftbook title. Then I know what to search for in the Craftbook or I know what the material originally was in case it was Stamped over and unrecognizable from the icon in the Craftbook.

The third would appear when "moving something between layers so the player is aware of how deep the prop/material is, as it can be hard to tell!"

This design was revised some weeks later when Halston proposed an entirely new way to display labels for tools and content. In the style of a traditional operating system tooltip, the name would appear beside the cursor instead of beside the icon:

There were several more concepts made of the above concept, as Halston was unsure about the placement of the tooltip and whether it should be underneath the cursor, to the left, or to the right. In response, Billy stated, "I think snapping it to the right unless you’re too far to the right in which case it snaps it to the left would work."

The concepts don't end there! On June 6th, Halston shared a concept for displaying controls when placing a Prop, which you can see in the bottom-left of the below image:

This controls popup is intended to change based on key binds, should those become available in future settings menus. We also intend to make this optional so players can hide it if they wish. This popup is primarily intended to be used during playtesting.

On June 24th, Ozy began to implement footsteps for Stuffy when they're running through a level. Unfortunately, after initially adding the footstep detectors, Stuffy kept tripping over them. To resolve this, Ozy "just removed the foot triggers in general since they weren't really used for anything other than getting their radius."

Footsteps have now been tackled in a different way, which you'll see in July's Recapped!

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From the 31st of May to the 19th of June, we worked on our lovely Pride Month graphic that was featured at the very beginning of this post. The request was initially made by Billy, with Daniel completing the concepts on the left of the below image. 

The final composition and art was completed by Carter! The image on the far-right was created by Billy as he sketched some notes for improvement. The final result is the image that made its way to our social posts!

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Thank you for reading this month's Recapped! post! A lot of things are happening behind the scenes, and we're slowly be surely creeping toward our next milestone - Alpha!

See you next time!⠀