Restitched: Dev Diary | Key Art

This month's developer diary will explore the interesting design process behind the official Restitched cover artwork, or otherwise known as 'key art'! The Restitched key art was months in the making, spanning all the way back to 2020 when the initial concepts were made. 

From idea to sketch, concept to modeling, and rendering to composition... Let's explore!

Initial Ideas

Restitched has its logo and branding designs, but what it lacked was an original cover artwork that really captures the essence of the game we're trying to make. We know we wanted artwork that was crafty, playful, colorful, and somehow incorporated elements of Stuffy's planned adventure. 

When beginning the discussion for the key art, we wanted to explore key art from other games to see how the common art style looks and how they balance the composition to be attention-catching and yet scale well to small sizes and different aspect ratios.

Concepts

The first concept was a sketch from the team's graphic designer, Halston. The idea of how to capture the spirit of the game was quickly sketched down before being sent to the team to decide whether to pursue that idea or not. Luckily, the simple sketch worked as a strong baseline of where to build from!

The next thing that to be done was for the visual to be further pitched. This took place through vector art. The goal was just to get down a base pitch for the arrangement of themes and color.

After the basics were established and visualized, inspiration grew, and concept artist 'MoonAri' began to properly conceptualize the key art by refining the composition of the image by balancing colors, elements, and more. The concepts were created in various size formats so that they could work anywhere, whether it be on digital storefronts, a physical case, or a poster.

Team feedback from the first concepts (shown above) led to more changes. The treeline was removed and replaced with more story location elements. Stuffy was made larger to be a main focal point and was lightened as well so that they stand out as the face of the game.

More details were added, existing ones were polished, and the entire concept got a nice coat of color, which really brought it all together more! Additional details were added, like stitching and patching the ribbony walkway Stuffy runs on.

3D Modeling

The exciting new concept art was available to reference at this stage, and the very talented Ozy ('3DreamE') jumped right into things. He first started off by arranging the image based on the concept. Eventually, the concept image was overlaid so the 3D scene could more easily match while it was being modeled.

After props were blocked out and added to the scene (other than the reused feed silo from the actual farm background), Ozy's next steps were to start texturing things in the scene and refining the layout and models.

As things began to come together more, the shade of some textures and the position of some props were adjusted. Additionally, the farm prop got a proper model that fit the art style of the key art concept better.

Before proper lighting and rendering, a posed Stuffy was added to the scene. Stuffy is seen here matching a very similar pose and expression to the concept artwork! The hill was temporarily expanded before being reshaped further.

One of the final touches we hadn't planned for was when Ozy proposed the idea to add fabric flower buttons to the woven grass of the hill. The team loved the idea, and so they were promptly modeled, textured, and added to the key art's 3D scene. It added a lot to the overall image and balanced the colors!

Rendering and Composition

The final stages of the key art's development involved fine-tuning the position of models and creating multiple light sources to really give the scene a saturated and exciting 'pop'! The assets were sent over to the team's graphic designer after rendering so the final image could be compiled.

To match Stuffy to his new surroundings, multiple light sources of varying hues were required. Blue comes from behind and above Stuffy to mimic the sky's color (which is added in post via photo editing). An orange-ish hue comes from below Stuffy to mimic the ribbony walkway, which was later adjusted in post to more closely match the pink of the Restitched logo. Finally, Red comes from behind at an angle adjacent to Stuffy to mimic the light bounce off the barn prop.

Despite the subtle adjustments and multiple light sources, you'd never know they were there! The final result blends very well into the environment to create a realistically lit Stuffy model. The fabric buttons were then added to the grass hill Stuffy runs on.

Lighting was further adjusted, along with the whole image being framed to make sure things would export properly and be arranged just right. It was at this stage that a fresnel effect was added to things.

The fresnel effect (which is what we refer to it as) is the particles around models/textures that give the appearance of frayed and worn fabric. This small detail really adds a lot to a render, and we include it in most of our character renders as well. It pushes for realism while also softening the image and giving subtle but satisfying detail. It almost feels like you can reach in and hug Stuffy!

Additional shots of the final composition can be seen broken down into wireframes and side views, showing just how much detail went into creating the key art!

At last, the rendered pieces were sent off to the team's graphic designer, who then arranged the composition in a photo editing program. This is the part of the process where images are warped around to fit better, balance detail to the general viewer's eye, and color correct for appropriate lighting and appeal. 

Other edits done in this stage involved artificial shading on some models, subtle overlaid details added, the logo included, drop shadows attached to Stuffy and the clouds, and a sky gradient with the game's signature blueprint pattern overlaid onto it. This is also the part of the process where the city skyline was added.

Finally, you can see most of the finished key art through the collage below. From concept to model, then to the fully edited render. Bonus points for the up close Stuffy face to fill that fourth slot of the collage. :)

The key art went on to be revealed through a community scavenger hunt event where our community members had to follow clues and sift through our website each day to locate and report the pieces back to us!

That concludes our Restitched: Developer Diary on the game's key art! Thank you for coming along with us as we detailed the process behind its conception. We hope you enjoy the key art as much as we enjoyed making it, and let us know what you think in the comments!

Thank you to our subscribers for all your support! We deeply appreciate everyone in our wonderful community. We can't wait to share more of Restitched soon!