SEAR DevBlog, week of 11/17: Our first sale!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From a personal and professional standpoint, the email with the subject line you see above, received by me this morning, was definitely the highlight of my week. I went ahead and included an optional donation button for the SEAR prototype while still listing it as free, and someone took me up on it, pitching in $20 to take a look at the prototype. Is it possible this was someone I know? Yeah, of course. But I have reason to believe it may not have been, and even if it was, after a challenging, exhausting, and exhilarating year, I don't even care. The first sale is the first sale, and hopefully it marks the start of a much more black-ink-in-the-ledger phase for the project.

Nearly as exciting was bringing in an audio designer this week! I woke up one morning fretting about the continued languishing state of the sfx situation in the prototype, fully aware that it is a piece that has to be resolved or at least well underway before we can enter beta. Before starting work I wandered into the subreddit for gamedevclassifieds, sort of halfway thinking about posting a listing there, and came across a post by one Jesse Jones indicating his availability. His portfolio looked and sounded great, so I reached out, and he's now on Team Temerity. He's excited about the project - I can tell just by the questions he asks, the ideas he has, and the way he talks about it - and I can't wait to see him transform the soundscape.

As an unsigned piece of software, the SEAR prototype currently throws a scary-looking Windows warning when you try to start it, which prompted me to start the process of getting Temerity Games validated by Sectigo so we can get our game properly signed. This is a lot of irritating bureaucratic busywork such as reaching out to my attorney for an opinion letter and reviewing our listing on the Minnesota SoS site, but it's absolutely necessary and it may as well be done sooner rather than later.

So that was how I spent most of my time this week, but I was also able to find enough hours to finish the design on converting our player res event system to an object-based structure wherein each PRE handles its own lifecycle. This is something I probably should have done to start with, but I'd been putting it off hoping it wouldn't be necessary -- I came across two scenarios this week where it became absolutely clear that it is necessary and this can can't be kicked any further. The good news is once I actually sat down with it and worked through how it needs to function, it became clear that it shouldn't be the full-on open-heart surgery on the SongDirector I was worried it would be; in fact I can develop it in parallel and test it safely without even removing the old system until I'm ready. Was hoping to get back to it this week, but the other stuff got in the way. If I'm lucky I may be able to wrap it up during my two available workdays next week.

In the project proper we saw progress on the particle-based wave sensor, including some concept mockups from me and some very cool functional prototypes from Lukas, along with a few versions of the new logo in 3D, which will be foundational to the demo (and final) title screen. Rachael and Maya worked on the semifinal polish of the new in-game SEAR font, and Chandler got the subtitle system fully implemented and moved on to the tutorial system redesign, which will allow us to be very modular in constructing different lessons for players. This may seem extraneous on face, but since the music drives the mechanics, there are all kinds of weird PREs that could happen, and I want the player to be able to practice and/or learn them somewhere. When that time comes it will be very useful to be able to just define a new lesson and drop it into a lesson-agnostic tutorial system to dynamically run, and now we're well on the way to having that.

Bracing for a fairly non-productive week next week as it's Thanksgiving here in America, my daughter will be off school much of the week, and my son will be home from college for the holiday. Looking forward to spending more time with family than SEAR : ) But I'll still update on Friday!

Happy Thanksgiving!