SEAR DevBlog week of 5/26: Close, but no trailer.

More red text than you typically want to see in your output log.

We pushed really hard and got pretty close, but we didn't make it.

The goal was to have a trailer ready by the end of this month for the Rising Tide Challenge. The first three weeks went quite well. The last week introduced at least one crippling bug that I couldn't track down in time, as well as the exacerbation of a minor bug I'd known about for weeks to crippling levels. Between the two, the game footage would have required more extensive editing than I had time to perform -- and to be frank, I'd rather spend that time continuing to work on the bugs than editing a video to pretend they didn't exist.

On top of that, I showed the gameplay to a friend of mine who asked a question about how the game works that I realized anyone seeing the footage would still ask. If the footage isn't going to make clear how the game works, it's not worth capturing. Essentially, the game is still not in a state where it tells the story it needs to tell with the resonator, the phasing, the musical sync, and the scoring/ranking. A lot of this stuff is new or being handled in a new way, and a trailer that doesn't include these elements (because they're not in the game yet) risks doing more harm than good to the game's image.

So I made the difficult call to forego the trailer. Disappointing, but ultimately I think the right call. We were simply trying to do too much in too short a time.

It's interesting to see these frameworks come into play in a very real. immediately impactful way. It's easy to read a piece about how this game or that game was delayed because it "wasn't ready" and feel some kind of way about it. It's easy to look at it like a gamer and say, "Yes, that's the right call, I'd always prefer a strong product to a fast one." And frankly I would have expected that decision to always be an easy one.

But when there's real time, money, and energy on the line to try to hit a particular date, it's painful to make the call that you're gonna miss it. It feels like failure, even though in the grander scheme of things, it may not be. People worked hard to hit this date - not just me, but the whole team - and I asked a lot of people very late in the process, including myself. This is a good reminder that working 24/7 is a) no guarantee of success, b) a great way to introduce the risk of game-breaking bugs, and c) unhealthy. Not saying there will never be a time again when I feel like I need to work at that level, but for the time being we need to pull back, regroup, reprioritize, and see if a Kickstarter this year is still going to be doable.

A January/February Kickstarter would not be the end of the world. And I really can't overstate how critical the initial impression from the initial trailer is going to be. SEAR has so much to introduce in those first few minutes. The way the racing works has to be crystal clear, and the music influence likewise - and the gameplay right now doesn't really demonstrate either clearly.

That said, for people that have joined our community Discord, I'm still going to go ahead and post up the first dev video, warts and all. Trailer or no trailer, I'm still incredibly proud of how far we've come just in the last three months, and the last four weeks in particular. People have been waiting long enough to see what's going on, and a week-to-week update on how things are changing will be pretty cool to see.

Onward and upward.