Restitched: Recapped! | March 2025

Welcome back to another Restitched: Recapped! development post!

It's been a calmer month for us, as our team was fairly busy with personal life in recent weeks. For those new here: we're a team of hobbyist developers doing this in our spare time... and some months are just more productive than others! Don't worry. We've still made plenty of nifty new assets, features, and improvements, so let's check them out!

April Fools, Racers!

For April 1st, we pulled a mean little prank on the community (sorry) by announcing a fictional new game called "Restitched: Racing". Complete with a new key art render, logo, and fake in-game screenshots... perhaps a little too believable!

It's not technically a March development, but it is recent news, as the last 1-2 days of the month had our artists creating assets for this trick!

We were a bit shocked at how many community members love the idea of a Stuffy racing game! We hear you, and agree it would be very cool to explore this idea sometime in the future when Restitched is done and dusted. But, let's not get ahead of ourselves!

Features Overview Post

We published a pretty big post in March that covers some of the features you may have spotted in December's game trailer. If you're interested in knowing more about how Restitched works so far (+ new screenshots and story info), check it out here!

Q&A with Trixel Creative

We hosted a quick Q&A session on our Discord server and Twitter(X) account. This only lasted about a day, but we managed to answer a lot of interesting questions about the game, development, and future plans!

You can check out the Discord forum post here, or the Twitter(X) post/replies here.

Git Commits

We made plenty of new commits to the code this month, with a few developers pushing updates each week for various fixes and features.

Building Material Script Settings

Thanks to Raphael's refactor of our levelobjects/groups system a couple of months ago, it's now possible (and easier) to add new object settings to our Building Materials.

This month, Josh added some handy new options to our "Gravity Fluid" material. These options let you change the force direction, gravity strength, target object(s), and even mute the sound effects if you like!

New Ambient Occlusion (AO)

Later in March, Halston replaced the AO tech in the game with a new system (Amplify Occlusion):

With more settings and better performance, this graphics setting creates a more realistic shaded look based on depth. Cracks, corners, and edges are now shadowed in a way that looks a bit more natural!

Stamping in Wardrobe

Lewis has started working on the early support for Stamping in the Wardrobe. This feature will allow you to place graphics on your Stuffy or their clothing items!

Although this feature used to exist in the early days of development, it was never fully finished. Then, we moved the character customization into its own 'Wardrobe' mode and changed our Stamping tech... meaning the work must be redone to support it again!

More Sound FX Support

Gabe added new sound effects spots in the code this month. Now actions like swinging, crawling, climbing, hopping off surfaces, equipping the needle, and more will all play a sound effect.

Camera Tilt Setting

As a level setting, Halston has added a slider to adjust the vertical tilt of the default camera. This is a level-wide setting, but can be overridden by placing your own camera zones. This will be especially useful for creators who want to make 2D, isometric, or even top-down levels!

We hope to add more settings for the default camera in a level, including things like Field of View, Tilt, Offset, and Depth of Field.

Goat Outfit

Issac has been working on improvements for the Goat outfit set, with more texturing progress made this month. 

New Cosmetics

Yousef and Issac have been working on a few new assets for the Wardrobe, but they haven't been finished or imported just yet!

Spider Polish Update

Santiago has been working to improve the Spider enemy model. Recent progress includes new menacing eyes, some fluff poking out at the seams, stitches, and a new body texture. Do you have any spider suggestions for our 3D Artists?

New Props

New Props were imported recently, including a Candle Holder object. So handy!

Stamp Updates

Our 2D Artists combed through the game's Stamps graphics and picked out some redundancies, outdated artwork, and more. From this feedback, Halston then removed, disabled, and updated several Stamps in the game!

One of these changes includes a recolor to our "Target" Stamp, with a couple of extra versions being added too.

Sailor Stuffy

A new outfit was made by Yousef this month, then imported by Halston. Introducing Sailor Stuffy!

Ram Outfit

Yousef created a Ram outfit this year, and Halston has just imported it into the game! Isn't it lovely?

Clipping Fixes

Several shirts were slightly resculpted on the bottom (nudged, basically) to prevent clipping with pants.

Nihon Hytes Update

Halston made some optimization and design tweaks in the Nihon Hytes level background this month! Changes involved balancing a more cyberpunk-esque color scheme with pink and blue lights, reducing the amount of props, detail, and light sources, adjusting some settings, and so forth...

Eastern Desert Update

The Egyptian-inspired desert background was also updated by Halston this month. The scale of the scene was adjusted a bit, and the architecture in the background was brought closer to the playable area.

Additionally, more Egyptian pyramids were added, the terrain data was lowered in resolution for performance, material textures were adjusted, light sources and hidden objects were removed, and more. By cleaning up a lot of the architecture and foliage, the scene is now a bit more performant!

Synthwave Progress

Carter has continued progress on the second version/redesign of the Synthwave background! This time, focusing more on the ornate buildings and adding nice little details to the architecture.

Note: this is not in-game yet!

Stuffy Tweaks

Small changes have been made to Stuffy's running speed, mass, animation blending, jump height, and more. We'd love to showcase these differences, but they're very subtle and more work has to be done on the player's gameplay scripting first.

We've also made the drop shadow under Stuffy more solid, meaning it's less soft and blurred around the edges. This is all another step in the right direction!

Firework Missiles

A new explosive object has been added. The Firework! This object can have its speed/strength set and explodes on impact. Halston and Josh have been working on supporting the behavior of the missile.

Our coders are planning to add more features soon. Among those, we're expecting to apply force to nearby objects upon explosion and kill Stuffy when in range.

Sticky Surface / Wall Jumping

Patreon subscribers will be familiar with this one! We've recently started prototyping a new wall jump Building Material.

This will stick Stuffy to it on impact, then let them leap away with some force when you try to jump off. You can chain these actions for wall jumping, or use it for clever gameplay on moving platforms!

Crab Enemies

Our next enemy type is planned to be a Crab! We're still planning the behavior, but we asked Ari (a 2D Artist) to come up with some visual concepts!

Special Asset Tags

Halston created a new concept for 'special assets', meaning we could toggle these for certain assets in the Craftbook as a way to tag them as DLC, reward, or contest-winning assets, for example.

(this is just a mockup, and isn't in-game or representative of actual tagged content)

Main Menu Progress

As we continue to set up our new main menu design, we've had to solve some new issues. Halston and Jake have worked to make the 'My Levels' list show up as a grid now! Formerly, this was a narrow vertical list of levels.

Hotkey Indicator Labels

Raphael suggested adding indicator labels when hovering over the hotkeys at the bottom of the level editor screen. This was suggested so it's easier to see what an icon means, or what exactly a function will do before you use it. Jake quickly patched in support for this!

Game Settings Menu

Jake has started implementing the game settings pop-up menu. This is where you'l be able to change graphics, input, sound, and other settings! We only have a framework setup for now. Once the actual settings are added, the UI design will be polished.

Fixed Brush Merging

An annoying and long-standing bug in the game (thanks to Unity, mostly) was one where geometry would merge when being brushed by the player. Even if you use a grid or don't overlap the geometry, it would still merge or group things as if they were intersecting!

This was because of a very, very, very small margin of error and the way Unity handles this sort of thing. Raphael made changes in our code to remedy this, and now the pesky bug is exterminated (we really hope)!

Cloning Stamped Objects

When cloning Stamped objects (like a Building Material), there was a bug where they could be placed inside each other but would not merge into one shape. This has now been fixed as part of Raphael's recent bug-fixing spree!

Cosmetic Code Fixes

In a separate development branch (due to its potential instability), DeRose has fixed another age-old issue where leaving the Wardrobe would reapply the default nose, ears, and tail if nothing else was occupying those slots.

We hope to see this tested, patched up, and merged into the main development branch soon!

Wall Jump Animation

Brennan has started working on a couple of wall jump animations that we plan to use for the new Sticky Walls material feature!

Electrocution

Brennan also made a new electrocution animation for when Stuffy touches something zappy!

Jump/Fall Animation Tweaks

We've updated the animation blending (and animation clips) for the idle jump. Formerly, Stuffy would be a bit stiff when jumping while standing still. Now, Stuffy will lightly flail their arms around as they rise upward with enough velocity.

Additionally, we've made it so that landing even after short hops will have Stuffy react with more impact.

New Airborne Animations

Based on public feedback from the trailer (and internal feedback, of course), Luke has started preparing new transitional and airborne animations for Stuffy!

With new idle and running leaps, falling and rising, etc., these will surely make Stuffy feel a bit more weighted and natural in gameplay.

New Music

Recently, our musician Thomas has made new music for the game! Taking into consideration some community requests and feedback, we now have a more peaceful piano-based track called 'Nana's Reading Nook'.

A 30-second preview of the track will be on our Patreon from April 6th, but will be publicly available one month after (May 6, 2025)!

Plush Tags??

We're working on something very exclusive and exciting for our developers, and possibly even for some community members!

Even in their early and very limited production, they already look absolutely stunning! Don't worry... we'll properly announce this if/when we can manage to make them available to the public.

Testing For... Wardrobe Testing

We've set up a basic little framework on Discord recently with a new channel, role, and forum. We're trying to see if this is a viable solution for future Wardrobe Testing phases.

The idea is to grant certain members access through an assigned role, then letting them chat privately with other testers in a hidden channel, or report and label bugs through a Discord forum.

"Trixel Spotlight" aims to highlight exceptional community content, whether fan art, commentary, or even in-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!

Literally everything we know about level creation in Restitched (by: PlushPiney)

Hugeeee shoutout to community member PlushPiney for the hard work they've put into researching, organizing, and publishing an hour long video about the level creation aspect of Restitched! Check it out and show them lots of love for us!

'Conveyor Scene' by Luke

'RTX: ON' by Daniel and Issac

(this is a meme made as one of our original April Fools ideas, though it was scrapped in favor of something else!)

Thanks for checking in! We hope you've enjoyed seeing more of our development journey, this time from our progress in March 2025!

There was quite a lot of back-end work done this month, so we weren't able to share quite as many visual goodies with you in this post. However, progress is marching forward as usual, and we look forward to more exciting developments still to come!

See you next time!