Restitched: Recapped! | June 2025

Welcome back to a new Recapped! post, where we cover our team's main developments from the month!

We're excited to share more of our progress with you, so let's check it out!

New Social Profile Photo

We've updated a couple of our social accounts to use a new profile photo! We thought it was a nice change of pace, and a bit more fitting to see Stuffy with their signature Needle 'n Thread while lit by the game's familiar pink and blue lighting.

New Promo Clip

Taken from a segment of the Official Trailer from December, this promo clip highlights some of the creation aspects of the game and brings more attention to the level editor.

Lethal Tool + Hazard System

Linus has made incredible progress in just a couple of short weeks! The lethal system is now almost feature-complete and acts as its own dataset. We can now apply lethals to any Building Material or Prop using the Lethal Tool cursor or via the object's Settings Page.

Not only did we get the lethal system fully set up, but Linus also added a few Quality of Life (QoL) features and general polish. That includes a shortcut to copy and paste the lethal type just by clicking on other objects!

Using the Lethal Tool, you can also right-click any lethalized object to remove the effect:

Unfortunately, we have ditched the behavior of Quicksand that was originally shown in a Recapped post from a couple of years ago. The behavior we had in mind did not work at scale with the other game systems and was far too much trouble to sort out. Instead, we've kept Quicksand as a hazard type that slows you on touch, then sinks you after a few seconds in contact.

Graphics Presets

Jake has added preset graphics configurations to the Game Settings menu! This means you can easily and quickly switch between our recommended graphics profiles. You can also choose your own by adjusting individual settings.

Layer Change Camera

Because everything in the playable space is situated on a vertical slice of depth ("layers"), we've added another new feature that should help with the judgment of depth while placing or moving things in the level editor.

Linus and Halston have worked out a way to transition to a quick secondary camera angle for a moment, but only when you're changing the layer position or thickness of something you've selected and aren't actively holding.

The object selection system in Restitched works in two ways, by design:

• Click and hold an object to move it relative to your cursor's held click position.

  • Example: Click and hold a banana by the stem. For as long as you hold the mouse button, the point you clicked will be the pivot point of the object. Scaling and rotating the banana will do so relative from this point. Changing its layer will scroll it away from the screen based on your cursor's position.

  • Using this method will not activate the layer change camera.

• Click an object to select it, then move it while not holding click anymore.

  • Example: When you select an object, a highlight outline appears. If you release the click button, it will stay selected unless you click away from it or press the ESC key. While selected but not actively held, you can still scroll through layers, rotate, or scale. Doing so will not be relative to your screen or cursor, unlike the first method.

  • In this method, the layer change camera will activate.

Emissive Recoloring

We've added support in the Design Tool's code to allow the "emissive" property on materials to update with the color a player sets on the item.

In other words, if you recolor glowing eyes, it will now work!

Multiple Players Performance

Despite no formal profiling or testing, Halston thought it would be interesting to place 3 extra Stuffies in the scene and see how the performance fares. This was done in the very early days of development, and the results were not very nice. Doing this today results in a negligible loss of performance so far!

Even more promising is the fact that there are cosmetics on all of these player instances -- something that's normally performance-heavy. This is a promising sign that our optimization efforts pay off over time and that we're building a robust foundation for features like online gameplay.

Saved Outfit Icons

Saved outfits now generate icons at runtime when opening the Wardrobe. This feature was added thanks to our coder, Lewis!

Stamping Stuffy / Cosmetics

Our Lead Coder, Raphael, has nearly finished implementing Stamping into the Wardrobe! All of the important work is being done on the back-end, and it's soon time to hook it all up to our front-end tools.

In other words, Stuffy can now display placed Stamps... so, our next goals will be to get it working with the Stamp cursor, resizing, rotating, saving, and so forth!

New Outfits Started

A few new planned and experimental outfits have been started by our 3D Artists Issac and Yousef. Some of these ideas include an alien Stuffy, an astronaut suit, a mushroom and poncho, a gumball machine, a sea creature, a robot, and scuba gear!

New Lighting Props

Santiago has started modeling the next light source objects. These include a Chinese lantern and a garden light!

New Cubemap Shader

We were previously trying out the well-known Poiyomi shader (often used for VRChat), but have since decided not to move forward with it. The shader offered some nice looks and options, but it was sadly too bloated for use in a traditional video game. Each material was treated as a shader variant, which increased compile times.

Halston has created a new cubemap shader to take its place. It reintroduces a lot of the same settings and features we liked from the Poiyomi shader, but now with less performance cost and compile times.

Below is a photo of how the new metallic shading looks with a golden cubemap reflection inside:

Fan Update

Halston has updated the fan object to include the originally intended streamer bits (complete with physics effects). A new particle stream was also added for when the fan is set to 'Attract' instead of 'Repel'.

The particles also now spawn more accurately within the set zone, which serves as an accurate indicator of the Fan's range.

New Cosmetic Pieces

Baggy Sweatpants, a cute Stuffy hand item, and some sassy high heels are among the new pieces imported this month. Although we've shown the plush item before, it's now rigged with bones and can jiggle around!

New Skins

Some of the skins shown in last month's Recapped post have now been set up in-game. Some of these include denim, cardboard, cotton, foil, giraffe, zebra, wood, and more...

Viking Outfit

No better outfit for those times by the Celtic seaside.

Cardboard Stuffy Outfit

Nothing a little tape can't fix.

Plush Goat Outfit

[insert whatever noise goats make here... ba-a-aa??]

Soldier Outfit

Stuffy hits the front lines.

Pride T-Shirt Swatch

Happy Pride Month (from June)! We've added a new swatch to the Fitted T-Shirt.

Texture/Memory Optimizations

Halston has manually optimized dozens of Cosmetics across all categories in the Wardrobe! These small changes add up, saving a bit of performance cost... especially on lower-tier hardware. However, true performance will be evaluated toward the end of development!

These clothing optimizations mainly include texture compression to save memory.

Jiggle Items

Yousef and Halston have teamed up to add jiggle to a few more of our existing items. This is, of course, thanks to DeRose's work in supporting this feature and providing handy documentation to make the process easier.

Below are a few examples of the jiggle in action, on select items:

"Pollen Puffs" Shoes Concept

Daniel made a concept just for fun! This is a bee version of some fluffy plush slippers.

Bee gang, rise up...

Logic Exploration

Halston dove into more quick and experimental logic looks during the month! These are far from final, but getting a sense of the look and feel is important... especially before we get functionality set up via code!

Some of our ideas get cut pretty quickly, like the first image that shows a node-graph-like system:

Our primary logic coder, Raphael, is currently all tied up with Wardrobe Test tasks. Once wrapped up there, he will return to the logic system and push forward with its progress!

Padding and Polish

Halston went through existing UI elements (some dating back to 2021) and fixed them up a bit. Unnecessary components were removed from the Unity side of things, and other padding and consistency changes were made.

For example, the Settings Panels were edited to support dynamic resizing. Although this is not a feature at the moment, it shows how things are being streamlined, future-proofed, and made as modular and tidy as possible!

Similarly to what's mentioned above, the Game Settings window was updated to have better padding and margins. After this photo, a scroll bar was also added.

Halston continued the streak of minor tweaks with better support for label alignment and the clickable hotkey buttons. The label now spawns with a consistent and proper offset from the cursor position (not shown), and buttons are accurately selectable on hover.

Offset Settings Panels

Linus added a suggested feature this month, which was to offset the position of certain Settings Panel windows when they open.

This is especially useful for the Lethal Tool, because it's much easier to click an object and have the window open beside where you clicked... rather than spawn under your cursor and obstruct the view!

Linus also prevented pop-up windows from opening off-screen or being dragged outside of the screen's view. Additionally, we've removed the draggable windows feature from certain pop-up menus, such as the Game Settings window or other notification pop-ups.

New Pause Menu

Halston lightly overhauled the pause menu this month, giving it a look that's modular, tidy, and consistent with the rest of the game. This included a change in color balance too, so now the button areas and level info are more visibly split from each other.

Your player's portrait will now show up behind the Wardrobe button, too!

Item Info Popup Menu

Jake added the info pop-ups for nearly all Craftbook items. This means you can now right-click assets in the Craftbook to view more about them! These windows showcase the title, author, description, icon at a larger size, and any relevant option buttons.

Item Tag Icons

Jake also added new icon tags to Craftbook content. For example, any Wardrobe items with additional Swatches will now show a Swatch icon. This should help you quickly identify whether a piece of clothing has extra style options.

We've also added icons for contest winner outfits, DLC items, and Workshop downloads.

Selected Indications

Halston updated the look of the selected indicators this month. The checkmark is now closer to the icon and much bolder, rather than the previous thin and hand-drawn look.

The background was also updated to be a darker secondary color. This helps it show up at a glance, so you'll always know which item you've equipped per category.

Quick Save Button

You can now quickly save your level without opening the pause menu. This can be done by clicking the button in the Control Panel at the top right of the screen. If no existing level save is present, you'll be asked to overwrite a level or save it as a new one!

Hookshot/Threading Animations

Brennan has been working on a few new animations and poses for when Stuffy hookshots into something, pulls themselves toward it, or throws the needle mid-air!

New Wardrobe Tracks

A couple of new Wardrobe music tracks were added this month, thanks to Thomas!

More tracks in the Wardrobe will make the experience less repetitive, and you'll always get a random song at a random start point when entering the Wardrobe!

Sound FX Support

Changes to our custom sound effects system, TrixelAudio, were made this month by Gabe. New sound effects were also coded into existing features, such as certain gameplay actions.

Additionally, Joel has added support for the Wardrobe curtains transition to play a sound effect! When entering the Wardrobe, a curtain effect closes and opens over the screen. Halston and Thomas created a sound file to assign when this happens.

Clothing Clipping Fixes

DeRose has been working out a way to fix clipping on the combo of many shirts and pants. Belts have been a tricky problem for us, and the difference between baggy and fitted clothing as well.

With so many possibilities and style options, you can only imagine how difficult it is to get them to cooperate with each other! DeRose has added fixes on the coding side, but is also adjusting the clothing models themselves to help mitigate the issues.

By using shapekeys and model adjustments, we can prevent clipping in many cases where fitted shirts are worn with pants, especially those with belts.

DeRose further explains:

Invisible Hand Items

When we update some Cosmetic code and change the player's prefab, it sometimes breaks things in areas we don't expect. For example, hand items were being assigned to the wrong engine 'layer'.

Layers in Unity can determine what's visible to certain cameras. When the Wardrobe is active, we hide any non-Wardrobe layers from the camera. This ensures lights and effects from the level will never appear here.

It was a very quick fix! We just assigned the right layer to all of Stuffy's bones.

Icon Generation Crash

On some hardware, 16GB RAM is still not enough to generate all our Cosmetic icons at one time. This crash occurred anytime we wanted to recapture all of our asset icons (the ones that appear in the Craftbook).

The code behind icon generation requires all game shaders to be warmed up when the photography tool starts. This means a crash for less beefy rigs. We've since fixed this by not warming all shaders during the tool's start time.

Misaligned Cosmetics

By adding the boned and jiggle effect to some items, it broke the alignment of others. A few existing Cosmetics started appearing above Stuffy!

We even saw the Ponytail stretch out infinitely...

Out of Bounds

When experimental 3D movement is turned on (something we were working on in the past while testing Stuffy's movement code), Stuffy could go out of bounds! The code that normally locks you into the playable space was turned off, meaning you could freely move anywhere with most of your normal movement abilities.

The materials were manually placed in the engine just to see how far Stuffy could go out of bounds and still function. Surprisingly, it worked well! This is because Restitched is technically a 3D game, but with the stylistic, UX/UI, and performance restrictions of a 2.5D game. Very neat!

MSAA Graphics Bugs

For some reason, MSAA was turned on as a post-processing effect on the gameplay cameras. This caused strange artifacts, like thin black lines and shimmering edges. Turning MSAA off (it was never used) and adjusting the light source bias have fixed this.

Team Gifts!

Some of our current/recent developers will be getting a special visit from Stuffy themselves... along with a couple of other goodies! We're stoked about our new plushies and can't wait to see what the team thinks of them.

We'll be a bit less secretive about them soon. Until then, you'll have to imagine what they look like through these boxes... ;)

Wardrobe Test Progress

We're still hard at work on the Wardrobe Test we recently announced! We've got some of our best creatives on the case, and we're steadily knocking down obstacles and building up features and content.

We only have a few tasks left to close out, and a couple more things to patch up and polish. It's just around the corner now!

We can't wait to gather your feedback and work on improvements together. <3

Cpt. Stuffy Comic - Text Updates

Before we finish up on the comic project, we've been going through each page and giving it a makeover! This lengthy process means swapping the drawn text on each page for a font version, then adding a background and page numbers.

Check out the before vs. after of our text changes... Much more legible from a distance!

"Trixel Spotlight" aims to highlight exceptional community content, including fan art, commentary, and game creations.

Note: Featured content does not endorse, confirm, or deny any ideas, misinformation/speculation, and is simply a way of bringing attention to community efforts!

3D Printed Stuffy

By our very own artist, Issac!

Desk Slam Meme

By our very own animator, Luke!

Is movement in Restitched 2D or 3D (by: PlushPiney)

PlushPiney is back with another hit! This time addressing an important question shrouded in mystery for some: is Restitched 2D or 3D?

Surprise Pick (randomized outfits)

DeRose tested some Cosmetic clipping bugs this month and found some interesting results along the way! This was done by using the Surprise Pick option in the Wardrobe's toolbar.

Stuffy To-Scale

Fun fact: Stuffy's scale in the Wardrobe scene is not the same as their standard gameplay size! We thought it'd be fun to see how Stuffy looks when shrunk back down to their normal size while in the Wardrobe:

Brushed Text

Halston made a little joke in the dev server, but it's a good showcase of how easy it is to draw words with the material brush system!

That's all for now!

Thank you for checking out the progress from another productive month! Feel free to let us know what your favorite parts were!

As always, this is just a peek behind the curtain. We try to be as transparent as possible, but even our Recapped posts can't possibly cover everything from the month!

See you next time...