SEAR DevBlog, week of 11/3: Tomorrow is P-Day

The new SEAR font - currently in the middle of design phase

This time tomorrow you'll be able to download the SEAR prototype.

The plan is to update it regularly and progress linearly from the prototype, which is stuffed with placeholder visuals, sounds, and UI, to the final demo in Q1 2026. Hopefully those updates will be coming weekly most of the time, biweekly when necessary, and monthly at the absolute worst (we are heading into the holidays, so a little healthy skepticism of the schedule is warranted).

This week saw final implementation and polish of the prototype version of the last reswave, the "Target, then fire" or "TTF" reswave, which is a laser shot that fires on a target (if you have one) on the last beat of every bar through phases 3 and 6. There are some complicating factors with this mechanic - phase 3 doesn't have nearly enough targets nearly close enough together, for one - but mechanics-wise it is implemented right now the way I envisioned it. It definitely requires a particular type of level design around it which is currently lacking to some degree, and the second half of the mechanic - a way to defend against it - is not in yet. But it's enough for the prototype, so tomorrow it gets rolled out!

Lore-wise the idea is that Resa translates reswaves into physical effects, so she fires off the laser and causes the boosts that come from the music. My original thought was that since she has to face forward to fire the laser and backward to fire the boost, she could only do one at a time. So when you were in the middle of a reswave speed boost, you couldn't acquire a target for the laser fire. This made sense on paper but felt so bad in-game I thought it was a bug - and I coded it! I experimented with different ways of keeping the basic idea, but I eventually realized two crucial things: 1) It feels good to just catch every reswave, no matter what the dish is doing, and 2) no one is looking at the dish anyway, so the fine details of which way it's facing or why you can do one thing but not another will be completely lost on everyone. I just ripped out the restriction and now it plays much better. We'll update the visuals to accurately reflect the new reality later.

Honestly it's good timing because we started talking about the new design for Resa today anyway. I want her animations to be distinct from the vehicle animations so they'll be a lot easier to manage in-engine, and we want to make her look more futuristic and less low-tech. So this is the time to be thinking about how she could be doing multiple things at once.

I spent most of my time this week on bug fixes, TTF, and release prep. But I also spent a lot of time with the art team working on the logo, the vehicle redesigns, and the new font (shown above) which I am really excited about. The pieces are starting to come together that will transform the current first draft of SEAR into the game that I was playing in my head for the last 20 years.