Restitched: Recapped! | August 2023 (Patreon)

Published:

2023-09-09 13:47:37

Imported:

2023-10

Content

Welcome back to another Restitched: Recapped! In this post, we'll be going over the exciting and hearty developments in the game from the month of August.

Further progress was made on tasks for our Building Test, Trailer #2, and Alpha milestones. As usual, we're holding out a few developments from this month's progress for future reveals!

No more waiting... let's dive into all the goodies!

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This month we had some new additions to the team! Please welcome 3D Artist Evan and programmers Lewis and Chem! We're super excited to have them on board and working towards Restitched!

Additionally, a new Steam build was published to the team in early August. We'll get to see more about this later in the post, so let's keep going...!

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Around 370+ commits to the game this month. Since we started counting commits differently, this is one of the highest - if not the highest - amount(s) that we've had. Of course, while this doesn't accurately depict progress, it gives a good idea of how the game is progressing change by change!

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Taking to the Streets

Our new artist Evan took over the undisclosed city background from Matt that we've previously teased, and begun finalizing the blockout with a slightly new art direction:

Initially, Evan experimented with some power lines, though we later decided they looked a little out of place. So, some restructuring was needed:

Evan pitched a new blockout, showing a top-down view of how the environment would be laid out. More work was done to change architecture and materials, with Evan stating:

"I'm attempting to pivot and change up the layout a little bit. This means I'll also be slightly deviating from the original concept, as far as architecture goes. I still plan on keeping the original mood though.

I'm gonna make one road straight and keep the angled road on the side by the bar. I think this will give us more room to populate the area behind the middle building with smaller shops / garages / openings.

Alongside that, I went ahead and started working on a new ground material."

Put a Pin In It

Cade, as requested by Halston and the team of animators, has created a Plush Tomato model. After a couple rounds of feedback from Halston, Ozy and Evan, Cade improved the model by increasing polycount, adding wrinkles and AO maps, and tweaking the saturation.

Threading the Needle

Ozy created several variations of how the needle would look if it had a thread tied around it. This was made to help the thread line blend into the needle model in-game. At the moment we've gone with the bottom left option.

Bricking It

Cade created a few assets requested by Halston, including ancient modular stone pillars, tiles, and bricks. The plan for these assets is to create interesting architecture in level design, especially for our Egypt-based theme (which is still in early production).

Cade then textured the assets, giving them a weathered light stone appearance.

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This month our artist Carter created several new Stamps, a couple of which you can see below:

"I did some more stamps tonight, so behold: a really sleepy Nikola Tesla taking a sippy"

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Let There Be Light!

On August 2nd, Halston asked just one simple question that led to one of the biggest visual overhauls of the game and ended up being where the majority of our focus was this month. The question?

"Why are we using custom lights when we could use Unity's lights?"

...with the following comparison image attached:

(top: custom voxel lighting, bottom: Unity native lighting)

We created our own voxelized lighting system years ago in an effort to have custom ambient occlusion on materials brushed into the level. We also aimed for a signature look for the game, to be performance-friendly, and to support custom player-placed lights in the gameplay area. However, when you compare it to Unity's current lighting tech, was it worth it?

While it's impressive to say we've built our own lighting system from scratch, we also factored in all of the artifacts, glitches, and how it takes a good amount of GPU to process our custom tech. Never mind the fact our current team does not know how to work with it to create improvements. Pictured below is the glitchy appearance of shadows with our custom lighting tech:

With so many issues and no proper documentation, it would be a waste of limited time and resources to focus on improving our own tech when a solution is already built into the engine and ready to go. However, this was not the case when we started development on an older version of the engine in 2020.

After several discussions and experimenting, we determined that Unity's modern lighting is best for levels. So, work began to bring Restitched's lighting into the modern age...

The biggest issue with this change is that our support for Stamping things is broken. Our custom shaders that allow objects to be stamped require the old voxelized lighting tech to appear. Without it, Stamps are faint or invisible entirely. A solution to this is to switch to HDRP, which has built-in support for decals. More on that later...

Let There Be (Volumetric) Fog!

On August 22nd, Michael began to work on the settings sliders for light intensity and volumetric fog, setting up initial support for the tech. This involved taking open-source code from Unity 5 and adapting it to support the newest version of the engine.

Below is the first photo of the volumetric fog modified to work in the current version of Unity that Restitched runs on:

...and here is the first photo of the volumetric fog properly working in-game with Stuffy:

Naturally, volumetric fog is powerful and modern tech that enhances the look of the game immensely. Lighting is so important to conveying mood and building atmosphere! So, we were very excited to play around with the new lighting and fog to see how exactly it changes the appearance of Restitched...

We can now easily add settings that allow creators to optimize their own levels and scenes. Such features could include shadow quality (off, smooth, hard), shadow intensity slider, light priority (unimportant or important), and more.

We've already added new settings for these lights, including intensity and fog. Intensity allows the light to surpass normal brightness. Volumetric fog has been adjusted to include natural "noise" for a realistic murky look.

Using Unity's native lighting means we can now use special effects, like "cookie" textures, which essentially create patterns in the light!

This was a big change and an exciting topic for us, which we cover more in our Patreon-exclusive post "Lighting Upgrade".

Sharing is Caring

On August 11th, Michael added code into the game for publishing levels via the Steam Workshop. To test it out, Michael went ahead and published the first-ever Restitched level. That's right, behold... "Empty Level"

The first draft of a popup menu to publish levels is now working! This menu layout is fully generated from premade widgets in the game, so the visuals are not final.

After implementing features such as whether a level is Copyable or Visible, the Workshop began to fill up a bit. This is super exciting to see, as this will be the core of the game itself! Additionally, Halston created a new Steam Workshop thumbnail and description to help set the game up for future testing and internal publishing:

Michael has also set up support for "World Merging" which he describes as a way to serialize and save assets. This is future support for things like saving creations inside a level.

3D Physics

Potentially the biggest and most promising endeavor this month was the experimental switch to 3D physics! Lead Programmer Michael began moving the game over to a new physics setup, allowing easier development in the future.

Until this change, we've had to work with Restitched as if it were a 2D game with a 3D appearance. Most of the visual depth you'd see in the scene is technically faked on a physical level. As far as the engine is concerned, we're creating a flat platformer. This causes issues with the way Stuffy can move around the scene with a 3D appearance, and also limits a lot of our ideas and complicates the approach to coding and bug fixes.

Below are the only photos taken of this switch. The idea is to get this branch up to the same functionality as the main game so that nothing noticeable changes... yet. We want the game to work the same as always but with added back-end support for new physics!

As you can see, 3D physics is enabled and Stuffy and the objects in the scene are free to move loosely. Many issues were quickly fixed, but changing to a new physics system can't happen until we've recreated our custom Props collision editor. Progress on this was started by our new programmer, Lewis.

Our hope with this system is to increase the amount of playable "layers" there are in-game. We expect this to make new ideas possible and improve gameplay, too!

Switch to HDRP

This month, we began investigating the switch to the HDRP (HD Render Pipeline). This graphics pipeline for Unity allows more realistic effects and quality-of-life changes for developers. Most of these changes are visual, with improved graphics for lights and built-in support for some tech like Stamps (decals), volumetric fog, etc.

During our early investigation of this switch, Michael spent quite some time getting most of the materials and project settings ported over and patched up. The work is, unfortunately, too much to tackle for now, as we discovered that too many systems were breaking during the switch.

Below is an example of the improved lighting effects in this pipeline:

Halston reviews the experimental HDRP branch, and voices his concerns from a management perspective:

"I've just checked on the HDRP experimentation branch. As much as I'd love to be excited for what polish it could offer, I have very real concerns about the work it would take and disadvantages it would bring. I've looked through most areas of the game and researched transitioning. I don't know that we should pursue this just yet!

Any fancy HDRP graphics seem almost unnecessary for the type of game this is. There are some cool things like volumetrics, but we've already recreated those beautifully in our current pipeline. Had this been an automated switch with simple tweaks to get it to parity with the current branch, I'd be fine with it. But this is a massive undertaking and we simply don't have the resources for it. It's not something I want us to waste time on when we already have so much other exciting stuff to dig into.

I realize this could be disheartening, but it is still an experiment after all. This feels like the type of massive change you'd want to make later... We're already putting a lot of refactoring efforts into 3D physics, so HDRP should be taken off the table for now."

Halston explained how this could be a big setback for the game, even if for the sake of artist advantages down the line. For instance, the workflow of assets would need to change and nearly all existing assets would need to be combed through by artists and coders to bring them back to their original state. The switch to HDRP changes and resets many assets' settings and breaks functionality across the game, and the full extent of potential issues is still unknown.

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Failure to Load

After implementing proper level saving through in-game menus, we started running into corruption issues where the game would fail to serialize something or would process it incorrectly because of too many actions happening at once. We struggled to debug this issue until Michael added a dedicated "Save Failed" popup that shows the error logs:

Pest Control

It's a normal part of development to squash bugs as they appear. We do this often, especially after adding new features! This month we exterminated at least several dozen bugs in the game. So much, in fact, that it would be too difficult to name them all... but we feel it still deserves an honorary mention!

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Getting Blocked

When Stuffy is blocked by an obstacle, a push animation plays to communicate it to the player. We want this to be distinct from our pushing feature but solve any clipping issues our current blocked animation has. So, Brennan took to Blender to improve it:

This month, our animators Luke and Brennan have begun early development of a future cutscene segment intended to be used in the next trailer... but, as we said, we're keeping some things a surprise!

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The Walking Dead(zones)

Remember in the previous post when we mentioned that Ozy and Halston played the game with a controller? This month, on the 28th, Ozy added dead zone support to polish that experience.

The addition of dead zones to controller input has given us the ability to fine-tune movement. We've even added a walk animation, so Stuffy can smoothly transition between idle and run or vice versa!

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Stuffy Gets a Time Out

While this is technically a "Technical Tinker" development, we couldn't resist giving Stuffy his own category this time!

This month saw the ability for us to have local co-op players spawning together! Once an additional player's input is detected, a new Stuffy spawns. Once disconnected, a countdown will happen behind the scenes until they time out and despawn from the game.

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Workshopping Our Workshop

With the implementation of the ability to publish levels to the Steam Workshop, the next step was to create a functioning UI in-game! Here is the earliest screenshot of the UI, taken moments after Michael initially started to develop the framework on August 13th:

Halston later went on to polish some of the visuals, making the UI easier to use as a placeholder:

Personalizing Personal Color

Halston added a new Craftbook color profile this month, which is titled "Blueprint":

Setting Subpages

Michael added support for Settings Panel subpages. This makes it easier to organize all the different categories you can adjust for objects and gadgets. For example, when setting up a light, you can enter separate pages for Physics, Lighting, Appearance, and more.

Seeing and Sorting Saves

Continuing progress, Michael set up a functional level save list in the main menu. It's now possible to browse your creations from the comfort of our in-game UI! Afterward, Halston took to slightly polishing the UI for this. New designs and developments to the main menu are still underway.

Current Controller and Future UI

Another development made this month is a restructuring of the Craftbook on a technical level. This means our future Wardrobe menu is now in early development, and the choice to start on our new Craftbook UI layout (as shown previously) is now possible.

Michael has also given a bit of extra love to our input system. Controller input is now accepted across most of the game's menus, with the Craftbook now working properly on a gamepad.

Patience is a Virtue...

Our Lead Programmer added support for loading screens, which helps to ease the transition between levels and menus. Halston dug right in, designing it to match the current concept.

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The usual progress on the Cpt. Stuffy comic continued this month, with Ari and Carter collaborating to bring new pages to the expanding story written by Billy!

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Mocking Up Menus

Near the end of the month, Halston began drafting concepts for a more visually interesting main menu. Something as important as this has and will continue to go through many tweaks and changes until we've settled on something practical, functional, and pretty!

The idea of this new layout is to access various sections quickly. Each menu item may change the background when hovered or selected. Some options will create popup windows, lead to level lists, or take you to new scenes entirely.

Part of the main menu concept was a new visual for buttons across the game. Ultimately, this has not been implemented yet, but the option is still on the table.

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Our marvelous composer, Thomas, created several new musical tracks for the game this month. One is titled The Rhythm Below and is based on an old concept of underground mines he created. Keep your ears peeled for this in a future Soundtrack Preview!