SEAR DevBlog week of 5/5: It's all coming together

Well, ain't that a thing.

Discord surprising me with this little treasure felt like a very astute development this week. Speed VFX are in, UI elements on the vehicle are lighting up correctly, the master level and phase level structure is set up and most of the phase level files are in place, with landscapes - all of which clears the way to move in to solid grayboxing in pretty environments, which is exactly the goal for the trailer.

And I've got significant progress in on the trailer itself, with most of the intro completed at this point after having had a very engaging conversation on the community discord about the approach (thank you LemonUniverse for diving in) - now all I need is the pesky gameplay video, which I can't wait to generate.

So we're looking at two weeks to get the level presentable, followed by one week to make the video - a tight timeline, but with this team I think we can get it done.

One interesting development this week was nailing down a firm max speed guidepost to use when developing phase landscapes based off their duration in seconds. There are two types of phases - landscape-based and racetrack-based - and while the racetrack phases can loop, the landscape ones aren't really designed to. So that means said landscape needs to be long enough that a player will never reach the end of it within the phase duration, while still being strictly the minimum length to conform with UE optimal landscape sizes for performance. That calculation starts with a solid guess as to how fast the vehicle will be going, and I prefer to err on the side of caution there and just take the vehicle's max speed (player should not be going max speed the whole time, but it's safest to assume they might). Happily, if the vehicle's max speed is 360 kph, it makes the length calculation super easy, as the vehicle will max at .1 km per sec. In other words we can derive the minimum landscape length directly from the phase duration in seconds, which is perfect.

If 360 kph sounds woefully low for an intense, high-speed anti-grav racer, I tend to agree... except that games showing speeds in excess of 1k kph are likely spoofing the speed. Those speeds are simply too fast for most normal mortals to respond to. Now, when you get a speed boost in SEAR, you're going to be getting real speed from it. That fake speed stuff is one of the things that drove me nuts about rhythm racers to date. BUT - we can give you real speed to make sure you're able to pass when you need to and couple it with some cool VFX to amp up the effect at the same time, and that's currently the plan. (But don't worry, any blur effects are getting accessibility-gated; you can turn them off.)

In other developments I met with a local entertainment attorney who directed me toward a couple local music publishing houses with the idea that they may be open to a collaborative partnership, which would be fantastic. Keeping that prospect in my back pocket for now since, as with most things, I want to be able to demonstrate the game idea before pursuing it, so the trailer once again comes first.

I think that's it for this week - got a few working hours left in the day here so I'm getting back to it.