Restitched: Recapped! | September 2023

Welcome back to Restitched: Recapped! September was a bit of a calmer month for us, as we were fresh off a very productive August - which you can catch up on here!

Still, we've continued to work our socks off, and have some exciting things to show you from September!

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Trixel+ Anniversary Celebration

This month we're celebrating the third anniversary of trixel+! For the occasion, we're releasing lots of exclusive posts and additional content such as 4 Restitched: Soundtrack Previews, 3 Restitched: From The Vault posts, a sneak peek into the development of the next Restitched trailer, early access to posts, exclusive announcements, and more!

You can read all about the event and see the post schedule by clicking here.

Building the Building Test

Though we still have a lot of work to do first, we've set up a private internal forum for future game testers. We plan to give this a trial run in our upcoming Building Test, which will be private and selectively chosen.

We've also created an 'Early Tester' role on our Discord server for members to get future access to private testing channels!

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Long-Term Commitments

This month we made 278 commits to the code. We're making some pretty big pushes and strides (as well as a lot of fine-tuning) to hit our next milestones! 👀

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Tomato, Tomato

This month, our 3D Artist Cade began working on a Faux Tomato Prop, along with a complementary tomato slice on the side 🍅

Developments

Evan continued work on the new level environment blockout this month, continuing the work from the previous months. After revealing much of the background last month, we'll be keeping further developments to ourselves for a while... 👀🏙️

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New Building Materials

On September 5th, Halston added a few new Building Material textures and shaders to the game.

Starting the month off, Halston's work toward a 'quicksand' shader was explained:

I've got a very makeshift custom shader for quicksand working. It's kind of janky, but it flows like real sand would. The movement is visually distinct enough to show it's not just another building material hopefully. Though, it would be great if we could make particles emit from materials so we could show little sand particles flowing up to really tell the player it's something to watch out for!

Continuing this work, Halston imported a few new Building Material textures along with a new bevel type. Among these additions are 'Stained Glass', 'Bamboo', 'Chipboard 2', 'Plywood Paneling', 'Wicker 2', and more...

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Developing Dimensions

In our previous Recapped! post we mentioned that we were migrating the entire physics engine of the game from 2D-based physics to 3D-based physics. This is such a huge endeavor (that comes with its fair share of head-scratchers as we make the rest of the game compatible) that we spent much of this month continuing work on this area.

There's not too much more that we can actually showcase yet, but development is moving along and progress is being made!

You can really get a sense of the importance of this update by the fact that Ozy went through painstaking effort over the course of several days to make a Trello thumbnail in Microsoft Paint (wow):

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Dancing To Death

Starting from September 11th, our animator Luke began polishing up some animations that he created, stating:

First one is "Death_Fall v2". I made the movement smoother and gave more minor less jagged bounces when Stuffy hits the ground, more realistically. I also moved their right arm inwards so it wouldn't clip onto other layers. I also made Stuffy clip less into the floor.

Here's an updated "Death_Spin v2" as well. I made the legs less stiff when falling to the ground, along with making Stuffy bounce a bit more realistically since before it was more just a jagged jump up and down. I also made Stuffy clip less into the floor.

"Emote_ShakeIt" is now loopable. It starts frame 0 and ends frame 90, but can be looped from frame 5 to frame 80 if animation easing is applied and should create a perfect rhythmic loop

On August 24th, Luke also created a 'running backward' animation. You might be wondering why we might need a backward run in the first place - well, this is to play when Stuffy has thrown their Needle 'n Thread into something and walks away.

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Wibble Wobble, Needle on a Thread

As we continue to polish the game, Ozy began to implement a 'wobble' to the Needle 'n Thread, as well as some other refinements that you'll see in the clip below. Speaking of, Ozy acknowledged that some of Stuffy's animations are still misbehaving, but that he knows how to fix the issue. 💪

Providing some further constructive feedback, Halston suggested:

I think when the needle is thrown, Stuffy should face the direction it’s being thrown in. Maybe part of the reason it looks “off” in a sense is because they're just sticking their hand out and it’s flying toward something left or right even though they're idle at an angle. When we lock them to always face the needle while walking, it should look more natural. If it’s possible we could also try a very subtle wobble (vibration) effect when you reach certain parts of the swing and when rappelling or climbing? That might make it look more realistic like there’s some slack in it at times, because with a real rope/thread it won’t always have 100% tension to make it straight.

Connector Inspector

On September 6th, Halston began experimenting with connectors in-game. He prefaced by stating: "this is not development toward the feature. I'm just assigning a built-in Unity component at runtime and changing the settings".

Several of these tests were recorded, so we've decided to pack them all together in a single From The Vault post that will be published on trixel+ later this October, so keep your eyes peeled!

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A Colorful 'Sunny Day'

On September 10th, Chem created their own Craftbook theme called 'Sunny Day', which Halston slightly tweaked the colors of on September 11th. It offers some nice shades of blue with a contrasting (yet still bright) orange, somewhat resembling a summer's sky with a shining sun. What do you think?

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A New Chapter

We revealed in the trixel+ Anniversary Celebration announcement that Cpt. Stuffy will be venturing into a new issue this month! Of course, with a new issue comes a new cover - so our artist Ari came up with 8 different potential cover designs, with the final cover being hand-picked by Narrative Director and Lead Writer Billy. Which one do you think made the final cut? You'll have to wait and see...

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Special Delivery!

Remember the Mailbear Man concept from February? This is it now. Feel old yet?

That's right, Daniel re-visited and worked some more on his Mailbear Man concept - adding some finer details and shading.

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Green Thumbs Up

Halston made a few polish adjustments to the Farm background, which included changing the color of foliage to blend with the ground better, adding a new flower color, optimizing things in the distance, tweaking scene lighting, and changing the treeline images while also enabling their shadows to cast over the level area.

Ozy then went in and played with post-processing color correction to see how things look a bit warmer:

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Foggy Barn

Foggy Light with Glass, by Halston

All Aboard, by Halston

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Thank you for reading this month's Recapped! Although more of a quiet month this time, we are continuing to work toward future milestones behind the scenes! There have been lots of developments we're yet to discuss, but all will be revealed soon enough!

See you next month!