SEAR DevBlog, week of 2/9/26: Fun with Audio

Debugging collision noise positions: Audio listener vs worldspace

With the AudioSubsystem largely finished last week, we were able to dive in on some deeper audio questions this week, fun ones such as: What is the sound of a digital vehicle comprised primarily of superstrong metal-like material taking damage? And: When you hit something and drive away, does the sound move with you or fall off behind you? I'm sure these are not new questions in the world of game design, but they were fun to hash through all the same.

You get collision sounds now whenever you run into anything, which does a ton for making the game more immersive, and the "damage loops" - the sounds that play on a loop while you're encountering a "damaging" situation - are also now partially implemented.

I use "damage" in quotes there because in SEAR that word has a different meaning than it does in most games - it's more of a real world-type meaning. Damage in SEAR refers to any situation that the player wants to avoid: hitting walls, driving over rough terrain, getting nailed by falling objects, etc. There is no death in SEAR and your vehicle never gets destroyed. Part of the promise of the game is that once you start the song, you get to finish the song. That's because one of my biggest pet peeves is being immersed in a piece of music while playing a music-based game, and being forced to stop listening to it because of a game over. It's part of what makes every music game I've ever played feel like the music is an adversary rather than a companion. I'm trying to do something different with SEAR, which begins with the way you interact with the music, which is intended to parallel the way most people interact with their favorite song: they listen to it all the way through. The phase breaks allow for self-contained failure states and frequent clean restarts. In other words, if you slam into a wall in phase 1, get passed by everyone, and can't catch up, you'll be back on equal footing at the start of phase 2 (or possibly even at the head of the pack, following standard racing starting placement rules). That moment is like 10 seconds away. So given that the next phase is always just around the corner, there's no need to blow up the player pawn and rip them out of the music. In SEAR the music is your friend and ally! It brings some obstacles, but it primarily brings opportunities, and you never get knocked over the head with it so hard that you're no longer allowed to even listen to it, which is something I've always hated about the traditional rhythm genre.

Anyway, that's all to say that SEAR damage doesn't kill you. It might make a scary noise. It might slow you down or knock you around. It might make your screen turn red or temporarily cloud your visibility. But it will never take you out of the song. If you start the song, you get to hear the whole song - that's just the foundational design premise of the game.

Let's see, what else...

We're working on a live-waveform cursor (driven by the music) for highlighting certain top-level menu options and text in the trailer, and a draft version of that is now ready, along with the Synesthesia Wrapper blueprint for storing and doling out NRT data from Synesthesia at runtime.

The rough version of Groove I showed a couple weeks ago is now testable in game - it's not the default pawn yet because it still needs a lot of detail and is probably getting at least one more major UV facelift, but this early version allows to get cranking on sorting out its physics issues, which will get underway next week.

I've gotten a high-level budget for marketing expenses for the year - influencer outreach, social media, video production, showcase placement, etc. - and wowee. It was more than double what I had originally estimated (with my highly-scientific method of plucking a number out of thin air). Diving deeper into that next week, but as long as the plan looks solid and metrics and goals are clear, I'm probably going to bite on it. Really excited to start getting the word out about this game, and I would hate to have it not find its audience because I started getting precious now.

Paper design for the final phase of the trailer level wrapped this week and work on the in-game blockout level got started. This is a very cool level with branching paths and a new mechanic we're calling a Speed Zone which lights up and reacts to the electric guitar part in the music.

Aforementioned trailer also got some tweaking of the script and anticipated visuals.

On top of all that I was able to make strides in revising our input acceptance and menu navigation process, which was formerly manually written and unnecessarily hard coded, so that it just uses the native UE logic which is much cleaner (and easier for artists without a lot of coding comfort level to work with).

Speaking of artists, illness struck again this week, this time in the form of RSV, which did set back some of our art development - especially on Groove. But with this much progress on other fronts, I'm not too concerned.

Talk to you soon!