SEAR DevBlog, week of 10/27: One week to go

Taking the logo in a new direction

I've decided to take that extra week before releasing the public prototype. We are very close to a final revamp on the game logo and completing implementation on the last reswave, and both things would benefit the prototype enough to wait and make sure they're in.

Here's where we made progress this week:

• Logo redesign: Starting more or less from scratch, we've been conducting an iterative process over the course of the week that's involved different colors, shapes, letter connections, fonts - the whole thing. The logo above is pretty close to where we're going to end up. Without rehashing every step we took to get here, what I like about it is that the tops of the R and the S hint at a single long oval - kind of like a racetrack. In fact we explored that direction more deeply with some other models:

  

  

  What I like about all these designs is that the racetrack oval is subverted; you have the intimation of the typical race, but the track jukes away from where it's expected to go - either down into the angle of the A or straight off into the distance, implying an infinite track, which is exactly how SEAR phases work! So I'm kind of excited about the symbology here. Ultimately I felt like the oval was just a bit too on the nose and I have a really cool idea for how to animate into a logo with the shape of that top one on the title screen and website, etc. so that's the direction we're leaning. It should be finalized next week, and that coupled with some of the vehicle redesigns should finally let us update some of those pending box art images and get these art design dominoes falling.

• The last reswave: This is an optional laser fire mechanic present in phases 3 & 6 which allows the player to destroy the vehicle ahead of them (if there is one). Due to the fact that it's not always available, it destroys another vehicle, it requires live position tracking, and its musical triggers are on the half-beat, it's by far the trickiest reswave. Which is why it's taken so long to reach final implementation despite having a working shell for months. We figured out some key parts of the visual language to communicate this reswave's prompts in a hopefully intuitive manner this week, parallel to working on the nuts and bolts of getting it working in game how it's supposed to. One more week should be enough to get it operational and tested. If not, we'll launch without it and patch it in asap.

• Wave sensor: This bad boy is now generating a single new object for every reswave that needs prompting, just as planned. It works really well, if still on placeholder visuals. Once the particle effects are in I think it will really pop. The blueprint also needs some rewriting to make it more scalable and the objects a bit more self-contained.

• Bug fixes and redesigns: I finally fixed a stubborn bad reference in the ABP that's been haunting me for months, which required several different approaches before I found the right one and a fairly heavy rewrite of some of the animation logic. On top of that we had continuing updates to the Pause menu, per-phase reach calculations, voice lines, and physics.

Physics continues to have some irritating flaws unfortunately. While the vehicle is no longer flipping, when all boosts are lining up it does have a tendency to go airborne and stay there. It's a fairly infrequent bug, so I don't think it should delay a prototype, but it definitely needs to be under control before the final demo. This is the biggest flaw in the game right now but it's also the most subject to budget constraints, which is a nasty combination. We'll get there one way or another, hopefully soon.

In any case, I will be putting a prototype up on itch next week, no later than next weekend. You can take it to the bank.