SEAR DevBlog, week of 1/12/26: Style fundamentals

The drawing board

I had a lot of financial and legal stuff to deal with this week with tax season getting started, so I primarily tried to keep approvals flowing and get out of the team's way. I'd say I was about 80% successful. I brought a couple people up to speed on elements on the project I normally handle, enabling them to make some updates without my direct involvement - in particular, AI vehicles that appear in the race level without competing in the race itself, and speed zones for the new trailer level we're working on which are connected to sound cues from the song (this particular one is cued to an electric guitar part).

On top of that we made strides on audio, with several sound effects getting closer to an L3 state, and with the Groove redesign, which had to be reconstructed in a 3D state. We were having some difficulties for a few weeks there getting the mesh to match the 2D concept art, a problem I believe we've finally moved past this week. I'm really grateful for that because the new Groove vehicle is going to be the face of SEAR - it encapsulates all of the design changes we're bringing to the entire game's presentation, and I can't wait for it to be finished. The trailer, the box art, even the main menu are all waiting for it.

Also started some good feedback rounds on the new art for the UI elements - the phase map, checkboxes, scroll bars, mouse cursor, and all the rest of it - that need to be brought into alignment with the new aesthetic.

The most interesting conversation this week was probably around sound effects though. We're experimenting with tone-matching some sounds to the key and scale of the song that's playing. This is easy enough to do with a runtime synthesized sound, but the bigger question is whether it's a good idea, and if so, how specifically to implement it. We have to walk a fine line between creating sounds that mesh with the song's feel and sound like they fit but at the same time are honoring the song and clearly not trying to overwrite or supplement it. We're also beginning to reach a point of saturation in the overall soundscape as more sfx comes online, prompting a lot of interesting discussions about how many we actually need and how to handle the mix.

It was a good week, even if it didn't result in a lot of concrete things I can show right now.