SEAR DevBlog, week of 10/20: More updates ahead of the public prototype

Concepting for the new design direction, starting with Wasp.

Fairly work-a-day week. Plenty of progress, nothing terribly exciting.

The "Dish Circle" has a working name - now it's the Wave Sensor. Requirements for the Wave Sensor (so it spawns a new one for every reswave instead of just a single element they all have to fight for) are written and development is underway.

First draft of the functional Pause screen updates went in this week, so it now shows the current song's title card and info for the current phase, along with the player's current reach and rank. Player can also hit a button to view the full control layout, and the animation to slide that in is working. So far so good - biggest issue right now is the placing and sizing is a bit janky, but we'll keep working on it.

After another week of messing around with it I still have yet to see the vehicle flip with the new physics, so I'm happy enough with it to launch with it at the end of the month and let players break it. : ) We had a physics-related build error that cost me a little sleep, but ended up being easily resolved by just refreshing all in-game pawns.

The following news will only be exciting to me, but I managed to improve on the load screen functionality from how it worked in the Epic submission. It still hitches because we still can't use MoviePlayer for every step of the load... but by hooking into the PostLoad delegate we're able to avoid the screen flicker that was present in the previous prototype. So the final load screen is in.

We had additional concept work on the vehicle redesigns. Everything has at least a few drafts done, with Raptor, Brute, and Wasp pretty well locked in (you can see the Wasp redesign at the top of the page). Needle and Groove I'm still chewing on. We may also be experimenting with some new fonts and looks on the website in the coming weeks. (Website is pretty rough, so I'm hoping it won't take much to spruce it up.)

The big plan for next week is to finalize the Pause screen, finish the new Wave Sensor functionality, and complete enough polish on the laser fire reswave that we can publish the prototype with it. Then, if publishing to itch.io is as easy as it looks, we may be live in the wild with a free prototype download by Halloween! Worst case I can see taking an extra week to get everything working correctly for that upload, but I'm hoping not to have to do that.

Exciting times!