SEAR DevBlog, week of 5/11/26: Proceeding Apace

The final phase for the Escape From Korus level (in development), aerial view.

Week of 5/11

My Schroedinger conundrum continues this week to a fair extent, but I can say I spent a lot of time writing and revising copy, getting images in on landing pages, revising KS prep from last week, and other marketing-related things. On the project side, our focus remains on getting all the transitions ready in the main prototype level and continuing work on implementing the tutorial changes. If the presentation on that ends up looking half as pretty as the concept art, it’s going to be a beautiful introduction to SEAR. 

I have been thinking there are a number of other topics I’d like to cover in this blog, and since I don’t have a lot of final deliverables to report on this week, it seemed like a good time to use this space to start that. AI is a massive topic fraught with difficulty and pitfalls for any game studio, let alone a fledgling self-funded one, so I thought hey, why not start with that?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my first draft at a post on AI started turning into something more akin to a treatise. I have a lot of thoughts on it. It's also a topic I want to handle very carefully, even when I'm saying things that are fairly standard for an indie game studio today. So I'm going to let this one percolate a little more instead of rushing something out.

For now I'll just say this: I hate that we seem to have ceded semicolons and em-dashes (em-dashes? Really?) to AI. I'm a lifelong lover of both, especially the semicolon, and watching the encroachment of what used to be called a comma splice into everyday acceptability has slowly painted me with something like despair. Now it's gone a step further - now, if you don't use comma splices, it's supposed to be a giveaway that you used AI to write your text.

On face this strikes me as ridiculous. If you want to tell an AI to write using comma splices, I'm sure you can, so the supposed benefit of using them is moot. Semicolons are an elegant (and accurate!) solution to the problem and I'm not ready to let them go.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things, just a random related thought. More to come.