SEAR DevBlog, week of 5/4/26: More polish

This. This right here. This is why I need artists.

Updates for Star Wars week! I’m in a kind of tricky Schroedinger state here as a lot of the things taking up most of my time are things I’m not supposed to talk about yet from a marketing perspective, but suffice it to say this week was a lot of Kickstarter prep on my end, a little bit of UI stuff, and if I’m being honest a whole lot of family commitments followed by Mother’s Day weekend (the reason this post is going up so late this week is that my mom had her birthday on Mother’s Day on Sunday, so we celebrated Mother’s Day for my wife on Saturday, making for a very packed weekend). 

Lots of aesthetic makeovers continuing in game, including redesign of the crystals in phase 4 and finally moving back to a point-light based lighting effect there which is much prettier than the strict emissives we were doing before. Those overhauls are aimed at getting nice visuals together for the starting moments of the teaser trailer, all of which I am gathering today. 

We also have a functional version of the revised media panel in game, which will allow us to implement a lot of the fixes we need for the tutorial (suggestions for which came largely from VGM Con a few weeks ago and some personal game-showings we've done). Essentially we will be freezing the action, not forcing the player to read while driving (which is a dangerous habit anyway, and should not be promoted!) but cutting entirely to a brief looping video that shows exactly what we need them to see, while cutting way down on the text. This will be followed by live practice, though the player can pause the game to get back to the video tutorial any time they want. Every lesson in the tutorial will have a little intro like this. Looking forward to getting some feedback on it from players, but we do need to bring it into line with the art style as well first.