SEAR DevBlog, week of 10/13: Enter the "Dish Circle"

Prototype of the "Dish Circle" - a dumb name for a cool UI element.

Tons of great progress all around this week.

The Boostpad enhancement system is fully functional and tested. I found that it actually adds a bit too much intensity and additional focus to be used across the board in all situations, but will be an excellent addition to short phases that don't have a lot of reswaves in them to keep things interesting. It's gated off and highly modifiable so for now it's getting stored in the level design toolbox.

The first draft of the new physics is in and I haven't seen the vehicle flip once yet. It also ricochets much more satisfyingly when it strikes the wall or an object in world, including other vehicles (this was definitely the most fun I've ever had getting t-boned). Once the sfx are in, I expect the overall effect will go miles toward making the vehicle feel more substantial.

We spent a significant amount of time working on and checking in on the Art Design Document. We've decided to make a hard turn away from the retro feel, as it's not really what the game is about, and focus more on the lore of the game world - specifically each race's identity as a digital data dive into a "resonance event" - to inform the aesthetic. This will necessitate a redesign that affects just about every asset in the game, from the actor meshes to the UI fonts, but I've always known that was coming. The end result will be well worth it. We've already done one draft redesign of the wasp vehicle and it went from being one of my least favorite vehicle designs to one of my favorites.

I completed the logic for looping songs, which in most games would be nearly a no-brainer afterthought, literally just a bool - but in SEAR was quite a process because when the song loops, the beat counter has to loop as well, and all associated events have to be checked to make sure they're still firing at the right times. Then there were several different ways to do it, the most likely ones being manually crossfading the old play into the new one triggered out of Quartz directly, or dynamically setting looping parameters in a Metasound while the Quartz Controller just applies offsets to the relevant counters. I ended up going with the Metasound approach, since we were overdue to move the music files into Metasound shells anyway, but primarily because the crossfade loop was resulting in some annoying clicking that I couldn't seem to get rid of, whereas Metasound looping is baked in and sounds excellent every time.

We had a number of minor bug fixes and additional foibles with the load screen, which continues to be an obnoxious bugaboo. I realized our issues with the UE MoviePlayer loadscreen option stem from the fact that we are using streamed levels which do NOT want to activate the MoviePlayer when they load... except for the very first one. So we may still come back to MoviePlayer down the road, but for this month's public prototype release I've decided to just keep the same load screen I used in the prototype submission to Epic last month. It's a lot of smoke and mirrors, and it does have a bit of hitching because it's UMG-based, but it hides everything that needs to be hidden and reliably gets the job done, so for now, we'll stick with it.

Finally, there's that circle in the picture at the top of the post, currently operating under the incredibly sexy moniker of "Dish Circle". This thing is a placeholder visual for the prompts that come in when a reswave is on the way - they're to let the player know that that reswave will be hitting soon, and to show when to hit the SEAR button to catch it. The lights on the dish alone were not enough to convey that message, but the big expanding circle is pretty hard to miss.

Once it was in place and functioning more or less properly, I realized it was going to be key to the visual language for the reswave mechanic. The circle (which will most likely be a very cool looking particle effect instead in its final form) can take on different properties and materials depending on which reswave is coming, so it will be a convenient shorthand for describing what mechanic is pending. And we can have a new circle appear for each reswave, so for example in situations where there are two that land back to back, each one will have its own circle with its own effects to communicate that.

Currently it only displays the one circle at a time, so I can't demonstrate this just yet. But all the positions are present in code to hook into to make the shift in functionality, so I'm hoping the multi-circle version will be ready by the end of the month for the version of the prototype that goes up on Itch.io.