Sear DevBlog week of 4/7: What a week

Concept art pulling track, environment, and vehicle models together. Looking closer and closer to SEAR.

Not a lot of deep thoughts this week because I am exhausted, but here's the quick recap:

I spent most of my time this week - every spare working hour, actually - getting Temerity's application to the MN Cup finished up and submitted. This was my first grant application, and completing it required re-researching a lot of things that I had originally researched just for myself. Since late March I probably put about 60 hours into this thing, at least half of those just this week. Every drop of funding helps at this stage, so fingers crossed. No idea what our odds are (if you're on the grant committee and reading this - hello!) but the language I captured will no doubt be useful on future applications, just like I pulled in language from other writing projects on to this one.

Our newest hire, Rob, also put in a ton of work this week for the website proper, hoping to get it up and running by this morning. He hit the timeline I asked him to, but I missed mine - there are some placeholder text entries I still need to complete. That said, we're really close to an actual, serviceable website, which I'm very excited about!

Rachael made great progress on the game logo this week as well with some animated options that change how the logo presents based on the game mode the player's chosen. I haven't had a chance to see them in the build yet but can't wait to get to it.

The Needle model (player vehicle #1) is in the current game build and functional, as is the track segment mesh we'll be using in phases 1 and 6 of the prototype/demo level. I'm really happy with both of them - kudos to Maya, Hector, and Mayank for bringing this thing all the way from conception to reality. The track in particular I'm excited about - continuing our trend of keeping game information presented within the game world instead of in the UI as much as possible, it has multiple adjustable elements we can tweak at runtime to signal bends in the road, upcoming phase shifts, or reswaves.

Baseline vehicle drift functionality is also finished, modeled after a Kart-style drift mechanic (hold a button, then feather the stick left/right around the turn to control how hard you're leaning in/pulling out of the turn). We had to overcome a few hurdles getting this one to feel right, but Mayank knows his stuff and got it sorted this week.

Next up on that one is adding the mini-boost functionality, prep for which involved me and my son doing some napkin math time-tracking on mini-boost functionality in a few of the more popular karting games. Rough stuff. Some days I really love this work. : )