Sear DevBlog week of 3/17: UI and Art

Concept art: rear view of the Brute, an NPC vehicle that will be in your way more often than not.

I want to get into the habit of posting a minimum of once a week about progress on Sear, so by the time the Kickstarter comes around there will be months' worth of posts here showing my diligence on this project. I won't be popping out of nowhere in late summer with nothing to show - in addition to the prototype, I'll have evidence of how the project unfolded, how the team worked together to get it done, and how you can expect me to operate and communicate going forward. If you're considering the Kickstarter and have just scrolled back in time to take a look at the start of the DevBlog, hello, thank you for looking, and I've been thinking about you all year. : )

Right now we've got a 4-person team: one UE physics dev, one UI artist, one 3D artist, and myself, who functions as Executive Producer and UE dev. The physics dev has spent the last three weeks rewriting the OnTick vehicle physics blueprints into C++, which he doesn't need my help to do, so this last week I've been able to focus on the art and UI side. This week there have been huge strides made in each.

The concept art for the five main vehicles is almost ready. I want to share a lot of this in the coming weeks. Nothing makes a project start feeling alive like art, and the collaborative process, between human beings, of creating art is a blast. I have no artistic skill whatsoever, just cool ideas and a good eye. I've always relied on other people to try to figure out what I'm looking for, refine it, and make it into something that actually looks good. I love the collaborative process in particular because it's really cool seeing the art develop in a new direction and take on elements that other team members bring to it. We are very, very close to completed concept art for the Sear vehicles, and once that's done (probably next week) we'll be moving in to development of the 3D assets. I can't wait to get the placeholder vehicle out of the prototype and start testing with Raptor and Needle. : )

The UI is also coming along really well. In past weeks we more-or-less finalized the design approach for the racing HUD. I'm going to make another post talking about the unique challenges of the Sear HUD, but in summary, the entire level is time-based rather than distance-based, and this affects the HUD in all kinds of ways, chief among them being that the HUD must communicate several different pieces of time-based information to the player in a tidy and glance-able way. The fact that the level changes as you drive on it also makes a traditional track mini-map not terribly useful, so that has to be considered too. This week we made huge strides on two of the most crucial pieces of the HUD - one of them is now fully functional, and the other has all the groundwork laid.

My wife said I was working "founder's hours" this week - I essentially worked overnight Wednesday night. Not because I wanted to, but because my brain just wouldn't stop. The second I finished what I had been working on, early Thursday afternoon, every cell in my body turned toward rest, and I went off to take a nap.

I don't think I've been this absorbed in my work since I wrote my first novel, and possibly not even then.