SEAR DevBlog, week of 2/2/26: Coding!

The unholy amalgamation of new Groove and old Needle.

Apologies for the god-awful image, I just thought it was funny. This was the result of a quickie slapped-in mesh replacement on a call for the Groove design. At first I thought it just had Needle's paint job, but it turned out it actually had all of Needle, which cracked me up at the time.

The Groove visual is really coming along and I'm excited to see it all come together soon. This week we discussed body texturing, window placement, dynamic DUI element placement, and emitter locations.

I'm looking forward to the dynamic diegetic UI elements! We are setting the locations and general shapes of these lines on the vehicle body along with default data connections (turbo count, current rank, phase time remaining) - but in-game the player will be able to re-map these. So if they'd rather see their turbo count as a display along the rear of the cockpit, they'll be able to do that.

I was really looking forward to being back in the project this week, so naturally our water heater sprang a leak and began flooding our basement Sunday night. Thankfully we caught it before it did too much damage, but the downside of working from a home office, of course, is that something like that affects your work schedule in a very direct way. Dealing with the contractors and the repairs ending up eating a good chunk of my time this week, but I was able to spend a fair bit of time in the project, testing the collision fixes I made last week, chasing down a few bugs, and adding functionality for event-driven looping sfx in to our Audio Subsystem. It is quite a thrill to have that last thing working, as it was the last major obstacle blocking a lot of the sfx design that still needs to be done.

From a launch perspective, we are looking at an announcement in an April showcase and still digging in to social media strategy.

Oh, and we had our second bit of revenue! Someone donated $5 for the SEAR prototype. :D Not enough to single-handedly keep us afloat, but a nice morale boost and a pleasant surprise.

More soon!