SEAR DevBlog, week of 4/6/26: Patch Prep!

Evolution of Groove

A lot more Kickstarter prep this week, including generating a lot of still assets and starting work on some of the new videos we’ll need. Groove is fully functional and is now the primary vehicle in the game, with all the baseline diegetic UI elements working. The turbo line looks incredibly good in my humble opinion. The transmission lines and resonator are not there just yet, but hopefully soon. 

We are still having some physics issues with the antigrav track in some situations, particularly when the vehicle hits the inside curve of a tilted track, but we have a pending fix for that that should work nicely. Can't wait for that to go in so that we can stop tiptoeing around with the track layouts and really cut loose.

The logic for the standard transition animation is almost finished too - the transition itself is now butter-smooth and looks fantastic, but there is a lingering bug around a UI overwrite that's preventing the display of results at the end of the new phase. That should be an easy fix once I just have time to hunt it down - hopefully tomorrow - and then the transition system will be all ready to go and it should be easy enough to get the other two standard transitions in by the weekend!

Otherwise it’s been a lot of bug fixes and tweaks getting ready for the con this weekend, which will be accompanied by a long-overdue update to the prototype that’s out on Itch! The new update will feature a ton of awesome stuff, the biggest being Groove itself, but nearly as huge is a massive suite of new sound effects. Then there’s also a facelift to a number of the levels, especially the tutorial race and ice cave. Under the hood there’s an entirely new Reswave system which ironed out a bunch of bugs related to catching Reswaves and set up the system for scalability. Looking forward to getting this one into people’s hands - literally, in the case of people at VGMCon playing the game with a Temerity controller : )