SEAR DevBlog, week of 12/8/25: Big, productive week

The nascent in-game logo animation: hinting at big things to come

About 9pm last Friday I got the notice from Epic that SEAR didn't make the cut for a Megagrant this round. Disappointing, briefly demoralizing, but something like that is never more than a toss of the dice. They've got so many submissions to go through that any little thing can easily destroy your chances, no matter how deserving your project might be - that's just the nature of the beast. So I'm not taking it as any kind of comment on the game's viability. And any lingering ennui from this news was dispelled earlier this week when I heard from someone trying the game for the first time who, it would not be an overstatement to say, fell head-over-heels in love with it. There's no substitute for that, not even a six-figure grant.

To prove we didn't let this bad news slow us down, this week we:

• Pushed the object-based Reswave system into the main workstream (that means it's pretty much finished and running in the live development version of the game)

• Pushed the rewritten tutorial system in the main workstream

• Continued work on our audio architecture design process, including converting last week's AudioManager actor to a more robust AudioSubsystem

• Project managed the crap out of the sound effect question - finished up a complete list of everything needed sortable by project priority, hook status, implementation status, and design status

• Saw (well, heard) several new L1 sfx enter into the game in both the UI and gameplay, rapidly plugging that sound effect vacuum

• Had an in-depth discussion on the new UI direction - we're targeting a "sleeker version of Tron Legacy" aesthetic overall, which looks very cool, but the current challenge is to find a way to make sure that super chill, highly advanced look marries well with the absolute banger of a song that will be accompanying it at any given time

• Got several mockups for said new UI, some of which were positively gorgeous

• Made fantastic progress on the logo animation intro (I know the still at the top of this page looks very similar to several others you've seen on this devblog over the past couple months - the difference is this one is in the middle of getting drawn live and will be in the game). I can't overstate how excited I am about this. SEAR needs to pop from its opening instants - it needs to grab you by the throat and scream what it's about right from the word go. And this logo animation, coupled with the song that's already licensed for the main menu, is going to do exactly that. I can't fricking wait.

• Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, we sat down and got some solid direction on the aesthetic revisions we need to make to the existing prototype level to transform it to beta-level, demo-level quality and get some stillshots that will get people to click the ads they'll be seeing leading up to the Kickstarter.

I'm hoping that a lot of these changes we've made can get pushed out to the Itch prototype next week as 1.0.2. It won't look like a ton of new stuff - it'll mostly be under the hood improvements - but there will be a few things that really pop, like the new particle-based wave sensor and hopefully the improved (but still placeholder) laser fire wave sensor. And I'm eager to do the next push. Once that's done, I plan to throw myself headlong into this transition problem and finally get us some good looking transitions - that will be an enormous boost to the overall song story the game is trying to tell.