SEAR DevBlog, week of 7/13/26: Laserfire reticle, phase 3 redesign

New laserfire reswave reticle doing its thing.

This was another good week with plenty of progress in the project. For my part, I mainly did some more work on the laser reticle - was originally hoping to just spend a day or two on that and then pivot to AI, but it wasn't where I wanted it quite yet so I invested a little extra time. That still leaves two weeks in July for me to focus on the AI changes, and I'm hoping to dive in on those tomorrow.

The new reticle is MUCH more responsive to the musical prompts and should be scalable to other songs using a similar motif with just some new data supply. It feels and looks a lot better to interact with, at least to me, though I am currently in the process of trying to get some second opinions on that.

Team made a MASSIVE update to the aesthetics of phase 3, the Tundra Wasteland area, transforming the entire ambience with the frozen bones of some creatures who used to live on Zala, overcasting the sky, some great use of fog, etc. I know none of this is probably earth-shaking stuff, but it's not my forte, so I continue to be impressed by artists who can take a bland level landscape and transform it into something evocative. We also got some new racetrack meshes that reflect damage to it, which we'll use in p6 to hopefully further enhance the ambience there.

The final bits of polish are still underway on the tutorial overhaul, and we also finally (finally) got started on the save data subsystem to just get the game saving and reading in variables from session to session - EXTREMELY basic stuff and long overdue but does nothing in and of itself to explain or advocate for the central game idea, so it just hasn't been a priority. Now with the demo release on the horizon, it's finally bubbling up.

Last but not least, Jesse Jones, who did a lot of sound design work on SEAR earlier this year, made a little video exploring just a couple of the audio elements he worked on for the game. It's a neat little peek behind the curtain if you'd like to take a look!