SEAR DevBlog week of 6/9: How Temerity got its groove back

"We're ready for our closeup, Mr. Demille"

Ending this week on a wonderful high note, which is nice because it started rough. Missing our May deadline for TRC was a heck of a morale hit for me, more than I realized at the time. But as is usually the case, grappling with the data, taking stock of the situation, and formulating a new, achievable plan helped get me grounded and back on track.

That plan is as follows:

Get a working prototype which hits our bare minimums for telling the story of what SEAR is finished and out in the world by September 20th. This is a nice long extended window and I think it will be plenty, though I'll admit I haven't yet gone down the line setting milestone dates to the tasks. That's a job for Next Week Adam. The schedule is not entirely arbitrary; it's based in part around the next prominent grant application window, which is the Epic Megagrant. I feel like we're doing something new and exciting that is pretty specific to UE5 - Quartz is instrumental to this build - and hopefully that will give us a decent shot at it.

With the prototype finished we can start pushing more seriously into marketing, socials, advertising, and - perhaps most critically - get the Steam page up and running. Really, really exciting milestone and I have every intention of seeing SEAR on Steam by the end of September.

That revised window does push the Kickstarter solidly into next year though. So once the prototype is finished we'll move on to the Demo proper, which will support the existing prototype level with better AI, the Lash mechanic, a title screen and selectable player vehicles, a more polished tutorial, and a few other more in-depth design & coding enhancements. Essentially, a final gleaming polish.

That demo should land right in the middle of the Kickstarter pre-launch window, so mid-December. And after it I plan to more or less take the holidays off.

That puts our Kickstarter month as February, 2026. At that point the mist in the crystal ball will be completely replaced with reality, and the timeline for the Early Access launch will depend on funding up to that point.

Do I become a solo dev seeing this through to EA on my own? Do we get enough funding to get over the EA finish line with the existing team? Or does the Kickstarter totally explode and we're able to expand (both with new hires and more hours/better pay for the existing team)? No way to know from here, so I hope (and aim) for the best, but prepare for the worst.

On a personal note, like I mentioned, the week started rough. I was kind of limping through the first few days. But what I really love about this project is it will not let me leave it. Even when my mood's at my dourest the idea will never leave me alone. By Wednesday I was getting excited to get back in the project, so I prioritized that over the milestone planning I still need to do, and I'm glad I did. We have a few bugs that were really dragging us down last month and have been vexing me, and I prioritized those for myself and some other folks on the team. We finally have the nastiest one on the run - a persistent, progressive FPS drain that killed every game session and which Unreal Insights stubbornly refuses to provide any insights on. We were able to pinpoint it finally to a particular blueprint by just stripping everything else out of a test level one by one, and I know we'll have it squashed soon. Then there were several other ones that were just standing between us and a fun, playable early build that we also killed, including one I tracked down myself involving ResBoosts failing to work correctly with Turbos and other speed boosts. That one was seriously demoralizing because the ResBoost is probably the single coolest mechanic in the game right now - it feels awesome every single time you hit it - and restoring it to its proper glory felt absolutely triumphant.