Sear DevBlog week of 3/31: Finally, a pitch.

Behold, the sausage getting made.

Our first custom 3D asset, the player vehicle Needle, is nearly finished and should be in the dev environment next week! We also brought on a new UE dev to assist with non-physics functionality in the project (particularly UI/HUD) and determine some critical timelines for the Kickstarter.

Essentially: if we can get a proto-prototype finished by the end of May (challenging, but doable) we should be good to start our pre-launch Kickstarter shenanigans in June, targeting a September KS launch. It also works if the prototype is done by end of June, making October our launch month - but we don't want to go any later than that. If the early prototype is not finished by end of June, we'll almost certainly need to push the KS launch out to February, simply because the holiday season is a terrible time to launch a KS.

So that brings in a little extra urgency to this whole process, but we were already racing against the budget deadlines, so I'm not too worried about that. The good news is I feel like things are proceeding on time and we're in good shape to hit possibly even the end of May. A lot of pieces are coming together very quickly. Level design and development - the last major untouched area of the prototype - finally started up this week.

And that's all great, but the most amazing development this week has to do with my personal realizations about how to talk about the game.

You may have noticed the site has been up for a month and there's nothing about Sear yet. I still haven't explained or demonstrated the core mechanic. There is no front page trumpeting the game. What's going on?

Well, in addition to it being very tricky to describe in words (I would peg my success rate at getting people to understand the idea with words alone at about 35%), people tend to have a mental image of the kind of game I'm talking about when I start describing it. In short, they think of a rhythm game - or one of the many rhythm games that claims to be a "rhythm racer" or "musical racing game". With all due respect to the games that have done this (I've enjoyed some of them quite a bit, particularly Invector: Rhythm Galaxy), I have yet to see anything I would actually describe as a music racer, and that includes Music Racer.

But when I say "racing in music" or "racing to music," these are the kinds of things that come to mind for people. And in fact, the rhythm genre's dominant position as THE way to create a game about and within music makes it very difficult for people to picture anything else - the second they hear the word "music" I think they picture rhythm games, and if they don't like rhythm games, their immediate response is to shy away. I know this because it's my response. For years I was excited about "music" games. When I heard a game was set to or directly incorporated specific songs or music in its level/mechanics design, I always got interested. But it was all always the same thing - hyper-focused on the beat. Move your character on the beat. Hit the icons on the beat. Swing your arm on the beat. Make your attacks on the beat. Switch to a new lane to hit the little glowy thing on the beat. Dodge the projectiles that are generated on the beat. And eventually, my natural interest didn't just die away, it actually curdled into an active dislike for the word "music" anywhere around a game title - I just automatically assumed it would be more of the same.

Now again, I need to emphasize that a lot of these games are excellent. The rhythm genre has a huge and dedicated fanbase for a reason, and they love hyper-focusing on the beat, which is great! Classics like DDR are classics for a reason, and I absolutely love some of the stuff that plays around on the margins of what this genre can do - like Cadence of Hyrule, which was incredible.

But the big realization I made this week is that Sear shouldn't be marketed as a music game, even though it very much is. The word "music" is inextricably linked with the concept of rhythm game at this point, and using it pours an avalanche of baggage onto an already difficult-to-explain concept.

Instead, the marketing should focus on the core mechanic itself, which uses music to function but frankly could operate without it - it would just lose its soul if it did so.

And taking this a step further, I think it makes sense to present the idea based on what the viewer is most interested in. On the website, I'm envisioning something that actually asks you which thing sounds more appealing: 1) An entirely new approach to the racing genre which focuses on the little moments that make every race the most thrilling? 2) An entirely new genre of musical gameplay which rejects pretty much everything about the rhythm genre? or 3) An immersive, audio-visual gaming experience ala Rez, Thumper, Journey, or even Warioware, which takes elements of all of those and spins them into something new?

Sear will have appeal to you no matter which option you choose and is being designed with all three audiences in mind. (If none of those ideas grab you, then you'll probably need to play the Sear demo before you can see the appeal, and maybe - gasp - it just won't be your cup of tea.) But the on-ramp to describing the game looks very different depending on who the audience is, and that was a realization I just had this week.

So yeah. The game announcement will be on the homepage soon. I just really want to nail it, and these messaging epiphanies are, I think, going to make a ton of difference.