SEAR DevBlog week of 7/14: Everything on track

Needle has some new lights.

This was a good week. Hugely productive. We are cruising along and I have zero doubt that the prototype will be ready to go by first half of September. I can't wait to get it into your hands.

I finished up the Beatdrift boost implementation with regard to everything except the vfx that will accompany it - Mayank is working on some new particle streams for it that will really make it pop. He also cranked out the bug fixes this week.

Chandler got our new terrain landscape material painted on in phase 3, which lends some danger to the craters that I used to just blast through endlessly - now if you go in them, you hit the new material and it slows you way down instead. That's no way to win a phase, so finally there's some real incentive to avoid those craters, which was the original plan for the design. P3 is getting very close to finished, at which point we can finally turn our attention to phase 4. Chandler also got some nasty bugs knocked out this week.

Lukas added some new badass lights to Needle (see image above) which I'm really excited about, as those new running lights along the engine barrels are going to update as you improve in rank, providing another UI element directly on the vehicle model and saving you from having to take your eye off the road to check your rank. The outline of the engine rim is a UI element as well - it'll most likely either wind down or wind up to demonstrate how much time is left in the current phase. The turbo lights can also light up independently now instead of being all on the same material, which is nice because it let me code logic to have each one on its own timeline and color for gaining/using turbos, which looks much better - but even more importantly, it'll let me do some really cool stuff when you have infinite turbos. In addition to all that, Lukas also got started on a suite of new Resonator animations, the implementation of which will be my main goal in the first half of August. Dude is a machine.

The controller overlay Rachael was working on is completely finished and in the game now, and it helps a ton for bug report videos and for gameplay videos (you'll see it on the new gameplay video I'm going to post right after this). She did most of the graphic, Lukas finished off the final material logic, I coded the base infrastructure for the blueprint logic, and Chandler finished out the BP, so that one was a real team effort. It still has a little bug or two in it, but it's a heck of a lot more than we used to have. Rachael's also working on some designs for our prototype phase transition screen (more on that in a second).

Maya got the final 3D layout done for the box art, went over it with me several times, and is proceeding to the Photoshop stage over the weekend. We may have box art as soon as next week, which means the SEAR Steam page will most likely be up this month! (!!!!) (!!!!!!!!) She's also working on designs for the phase transition screen I mentioned above.

The screen is essentially a cool little super-brief load screen that will appear between phases. It's a stand-in for the really cool transitions I want to see in the game down the road - the ones that are more cinematic and better illustrate an actual physical transition from one location to another. But without a dedicated VFX and/or environmental artist that's just not in the cards right now, nor is it mission critical for the prototype. We've been through a number of ideas for a placeholder phase transition, but I think this one will be the cleanest and most achievable on our schedule. I'm actually weirdly excited about the screen, its major inspirations are the Metaphor menus and some of the more high-tech stuff from Assassin's Creed, and we're designing it to be exciting and interesting for the entire two seconds it's on screen. A bit of an experiment, but one that I think will pan out.

So that's everyone else - as for me, I started and aborted two major structural changes this week that need to be done, but don't need to be done for the prototype, and have breakage risk that is way too high with a functional prototype on the line. So - notes made, plans drawn for the future. I also did complete one fairly major structural change in our SongDirector object to ensure it has a chance to handle Quartz events before any other objects. No defects introduced with that, and it introduces new stability and easier coding, so well worth it. Then I started finally getting granular with everything we'll need for strong phase transition infrastructure. One thing that's really cool about this project is the way that, since so much of it is brand new, I have to see the game in action before I can really figure out everything I need for certain elements of it. The phase transition structure is a great example of that. I started with several generic data variables, filled them with information as I realized what information I needed, and now I'm going back to formalize those variables more firmly. It'll require some tinkering under the hood (breakage risk!!) but it's necessary to make sure the coding I'm about to do to implement the phase transition screen doesn't just have to be re-written in October.

I coded for about 6 hours last weekend on something I ended up completely reverting because it turned into a bigger rabbit hole than I expected. Everything we pursue at this point has to be vetted for breakage risk as well as criticality. Only things that we need for the prototype are worth the breakage risk of introducing new functionality (the Beatdrift Boost being the last exception). Everything else is going on the list for the demo & Early Access launch. We're also starting to work on getting a shipping build together. It's still crashing out of the gates, but that's why we're working on it on the 18th of July and not September.

If May felt like a crazy sprint, this feels like a steady hard jog. I'm working long hours for sure, I'm thinking about SEAR all the time - but I'm also listening to my body and mental state when they tell me it's time to be done for the day and unwind. This is invigorating and exciting rather than draining. And damn is it cool to see this thing coming together.

Oh! And I almost forgot! We have all of 7 votes for naming the last unnamed vehicle in the SEAR garage out on the Discord, so there's still plenty of room to have a decisive vote on that if you're interested. I'm also posting up our second ever gameplay video out there - will try to get it up here on the website over the weekend too. I'm planning to go ahead with the weekly gameplay videos at this point. I expect we're reaching that stage where week to week you're going to see a lot of cool changes going in, as opposed to just smoother phase loads and better fps. : )