Restitched: Recapped! | September 2022

Welcome back to another 'Restitched: Recapped!'. This time, we'll be reviewing all the development progress made in September. As you'll soon see, September was a very productive month for us! We've also shaken up the Recapped! formula a bit with new headings and the addition of GIFs!

Let's look at what we got up to in September, shall we...?

This month, our programmers made a total of 451 commits to the code! That's a big step-up from August, which saw 156. It's also the fourth-most amount of commits made in a month since starting these Recapped! posts in November of 2021, just behind April, June, and May of 2022.

September saw the arrival of several new developers on the tail-end of our onboarding spree from August! Our newest recruits include:

• Matthew Ryszkowski (3D Artist)
• Afonso Gonçalves (3D Render Artist)
• Luke Briggs (3D Animator)

Matt is rejoining us after departing earlier this year! You may recognize his amazing work with the Haddock Harbour and Moon backgrounds.

We also welcomed two new Discord Moderators to our team:

• MEXI1CAn_POWnAGE
• GitGudWiFi

We're so happy to be expanding our tight-knit team, and we can't wait to show you what these talented folks can do!

We also opened a new position this month, which you can sign up for on our website here:

• UI Programmer - Think you've got what it takes to help us bridge the gap between art and code? You all work with the UI designer and programmer to add art assets to the user interface menus, further matching them to our concept art. This role requires knowledge of the Unity engine.

As with most months, September saw the arrival of several lovely new models imported into the game by Halston. Take a look at these below:

Cade made a lovely set of modular pipes that can join together! This will be incredibly useful for industrial areas. Desire a bit more wear-and-tear? Distress it by applying Stamps!

Snatxi made a 'Very Very Simple Hanger' (their own words - not ours!), a Galvanised Metal Container (Harbour theme, anyone?), and a 'Cute Little Traffic Cone'.

Matt created this lovely Lobster trap, which may look familiar to those of you well acquainted with a certain sentient sponge creature. Though this trap was designed for sea critters, it seems to work on teddy bears too!

After a short hiatus from the team, Matt has decided to jump back into things with improved skills and fresh eyes as he works to update the Moon background (which you may be familiar with if you saw the Restitched Reveal Trailer). He wants to give it a smoother, more moon-like appearance with sci-fi elements such as distant moon base domes. You can see the very early progress of his vision below as he sculpts the new terrain:

Daniel pitched the idea of adding the new wardrobe screen as an option in the default Craftbook. This was decided against, as we want to separate it into its own menu entirely for players' ease of use. However, this is a really great concept for what the curtain effect might look like!

We've since had further discussions about the curtain aesthetic with Billy pitching the idea of the game being from the point of view of a child putting on a play with their dolls. This won't be a big focus, but you may find little things to help support this in our future designs!

Our default background is designed as a blank canvas for levels, but it also doubles as a construction zone! A minor tweak to the game this month included an upgrade to the level border's 'Chipboard' texture. You can see a comparison of the two below:

Listen carefully and you'll hear our artists rejoice, as our Lead Programmer Michael has been working on a new branch of the game with the goal to improve performance! We're happy to announce that it was successful, and the game now runs much faster! We can't merge this fix into the main game until we've ironed out a major issue involving cursor detection for Props, however. So, in true Michael fashion, he has taken on the tricky and long-awaited "Prop Collision Editor" task. Originally we had a very makeshift solution to generating collision (aka 'hitbox') for our models, but this no longer holds up.

For the tech wizards out there: We discovered that complex scenes and physics-heavy levels were chugging even on high-end hardware. Our Lead Programmer identified the root of the issue as being that each level object (including mesh geometry, or 'Materials') held two colliders when it only needed one. The first collider is for the player, and the second collider was used for detection by the cursor and tools. By removing the unnecessary collider and restructuring some of the game code, Michael was able to improve performance tremendously!

The catch? The select cursor and tools no longer detect an object by its model, but instead by its collision outline. This means Props with broken or no collision (such as a bush) could not be picked up anymore, as the cursor doesn't detect it.

As a solution, we're finally focusing on adding our own artist-friendly collision editor. This new tool will let our artists draw custom hitbox shapes around models for both cursor detection and player interaction. Not only will this solve our original issue, but it will also increase performance by lowering the number of vertices created by our old auto-generating collision system. Two birds, one stone!

Halston pitched the idea of draggable material borders, further taking advantage of keyboard and mouse controls. The idea is to reach into the scene and pull on the 'bounding box' around materials to reshape them as quickly and easily as you can in Adobe Illustrator.

With this concept came discussions on more hotkeys we could implement so that creators can quickly edit levels with muscle memory. We've found our existing ones to be super useful, so adding more can only be a good thing!

Last month's Recapped! showed off our plans for a new Build Mode interface. In an effort to streamline our existing UI to match the new concept, Halston has begun work to polish older designs. You can see the result of that team vote below:

We've hinted at an emotes system in the past, but further progress was made to make it a real thing. Below are a few basic emotes that will be used to test this feature:

Here's a concept from Ozy that was used to guide the animator toward a smoother and more expressive thumbs-up animation.

We've also worked on animations for 'Needle Slashing', improved climbing and idle states, sliding, slipping, being obstructed by an obstacle, cosmetic equips, and more! We can't possibly include all of the animations that have been made this month, but rest assured we'll include them in an exciting future Developer Diary!

We're so grateful for our talented new 3D Animators and all the incredible work they're doing to bring Stuffy to life!

Astro made an amazing new Stuffy render that's currently being used as @RestitchedGame's profile picture on social media as well as on our development Discord.

Below is an early version of the render as Astro explored posing. We've since gotten a new-and-improved Stuffy model from Lead Modeler Ozy, which has better face topology, improved texturing, reshaped arms and hands, and more (as mentioned in our previous Recapped!). We'll definitely be using it in future renders!

As per usual, progress on the Cpt. Stuffy comic moved along nicely! Here's a little teaser into October's first page:

If you haven't done so already, you can follow the full story of The Grandiose Tales of Cpt. Stuffy right here!

Although our standard lights have had settings for a while, we've struggled to add similar settings to our Spotlights. However, Jayden did some digging and found a way to fix this issue, stating: 

"The settings code written for point lights was not universal, so I worked on shifting that code to apply to lights in general, including spotlights. As a bonus, it is now trivial to add new types of lights if we ever choose to do so!"

For those of you that have read our previous Recapped! posts, you'll know that we've created our own custom voxel lighting system. We're still working out the kinks in this system, as displayed in the image below. Halston states:

"There are many bugs with the voxel shadows. Not only are they blocky and jittery when moving things, but it's also not accounting for opaque things. Shadows shouldn't be this harsh when materials can let light through them (artistically speaking)."

As Jayden was implementing the sliding feature, he found an exploit for super speed! Although this was super fun to play around with, we've since fixed this issue. Here's a gif of it in action, though!

...also, sometimes crazy things happen. Yes, this is Stuffy... we think.

To get the most out of our assets, we've made the default background's new 'Chipboard' texture into its own material! This is an excellent Building Material for those who want to blockout levels or make construction-themed things.

...we've also added brand-new materials! Here you can see a section of these: Leopard Print, Zebra Print, Chipboard (displayed above), and Aluminum Foil.

The much-anticipated animated material support has been added! Currently, we can use developer settings to make a material texture scroll by a certain speed on the X and Y axis. We hope to someday further expand this by allowing extra effects. Here's a GIF of some animated textures in action!

Levana created concept art for climbing on a side platform instead of just a back one. The plan is to reuse the same parameters and animations from the existing climbing (as shown in the trailer) and repurpose them for the left/right axis!

What happens when players reach a checkpoint in Restitched? Our checkpoint system is invisible, though creators can design their own visuals if they wish for consistency. In this concept from Daniel, we are shown how invisible checkpoints might look in the level editor and how we can indicate to the player that they've reached a save state. 

As a bonus, Daniel has thrown in the idea of 'Triggers', which are game-engine-like placeable zones that can output signals when entered.

We like to challenge ourselves by coming up with new ideas that can enhance Stuffy's moveset and gameplay. This concept by Levana explores how Stuffy might use the Needle 'n Thread to scale surfaces like a rock climbing wall.

'Halloween' by Halston

'Meet Stroofy' by Luke

'Good Ending' by Daniel

'Now You Listen Here Mister!' by Luke

So, that was September! What a whopper! We hope you enjoyed reading this Recapped! as much as we enjoyed creating the contents of it! Progress is coming along nicely, and it's super motivating to see it all in one place in these posts. We hope you feel the same way!

See you in November for October's Restitched: Recapped!