SEAR DevBlog, week of 5/18/26: Snow hills!

The hills are alive with the sound of music.

Getting ready for a Kickstarter is a lot of work. I’m starting to wonder if I’d just skipped marketing and funding efforts altogether and just focused on working on the project how much further along it would be. It’s easy to imagine some days that the answer is “a lot”, but I know that’s not  true, because progress is quite a bit slower without a team, and they need to be paid (as, hopefully one day, do I), so funding efforts are just part of the job. And they’re time consuming. If the Kickstarter doesn’t pan out this year and I go out looking for a publisher for SEAR, it will be nice to be in the project a lot more though. Not that I don’t want the Kickstarter to fund! Of course I do. I’ve just been spending more time lately reminding myself that however this year turns out, life goes on, there are upsides, and the most precious things in my life exist outside of SEAR. Kickstarter will be a turning point one way or another, but without a little perspective I’d just be having panic attacks all day every day, and I’d much rather be productive so this all gets my best shot. As someone wise on my team told me not too long ago, “Fear makes you slow.”

I’d like to get that on a plaque and put it on my wall. 

So this week was budget revision, hour allocations, task priorities, teaser trailer, more level polish, and Kickstarter prep. 

One of those was pretty exciting though - teaser trailer! We had what I thought was the final and then we found a couple more issues with it, so it’s not ready just yet. And when it is, I won’t be able to roll it out right away as we’re aiming to do something a little splashier with it, but it’s a thrill to see it coming together. I’m really excited to share it, in due time.

Some of the level polish was pretty amazing too. We converted the rough terrain in the dark section of phase 4 into what are essentially snow hills - they still slow you down when you drive on them, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to see in the dark with the vertical element, and they go a long way toward closing the ravine in and making it feel… well, more like a ravine. A bit more claustrophobic. I’ll post a video in the Discord as the impression is much stronger when the environment's in motion. 

One of the things I’m really proud of with SEAR, and which the teaser will be deliberately pointing out, is how every phase can really feel very different - not just aesthetically but environmentally and mechanically. You’re doing very different things in p5 than you’re doing in p3, 4, or 6. This makes creating every level much more of a burden than it would be in a typical racing game, given that when we make a level, we’re actually making 4-6 levels (although there are ways to obviate this), but the end result is just really cool. I like how many different ideas it lets us play with within each level and I think it keeps the overall flow feeling lively, even when the individual phase-levels are fairly static like they are now.