SEAR DevBlog, week of 7/20/26: 2DCon's Mall of America Mini Indie Island!
- Adam Nicolai
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
Had an awesome day at the Mall of America (in Bloomington, MN) yesterday. I (with my erstwhile Con assistant, my daughter) was there from 9 in the morning to about 7 in the evening. The event was running until 8, but by 7 my voice was so hoarse I could no longer compete with the overall Mall noise, so I threw in the towel. We had tons of players come through, most of whom really liked the game. and several of whom loved it. Had a couple immediate Discord joins and some Wishlisters, and met a bunch of very cool people, some of whom I'll be in contact with in the future.
This was the first live playtest of the new tutorial overhaul, and by and large it went better than at the con in April, though there was still one main takeaway I had where we need to improve it.
Feedback was really positive. People loved the presentation and the feel. They could see it was something new. I heard it described as "unique", "different" and "very polished" throughout the day. And since it was a public event I had some friends drop by to say hello, which was also very cool, though I couldn't pay too much attention to them because the display was so busy! Wonderful problem to have.
On the project itself, I was able to get into the AI controller and do some serious updating this week. Job 1 was to make it stable enough that we can toggle at will from AI and Player controller on any given vehicle, and I got that working and reliable. This week I'll be focusing in on improving the actual intelligence part of that controller, since currently it doesn't even use turbos or catch reswaves. After that, I'm going to be going in hard on the options menu, because that and the title screen are the last pieces keeping me from saying, "Okay, let's get this up on Steam as a proper demo." And I had a lot of people asking about that yesterday!
Elsewhere the project saw gorgeous updates to the open iceplain level, to the lava cave level, and to the digital wall the racetrack uses, with more polish still in progress right now. I love that the game is finally looking like my vision, and only continues to reflect it more with every passing day.
In only vaguely related news, I got a new dev laptop so I wouldn't have haul my entire office setup with me to Cons (and so I could do a little UE work in the living room on the couch), and it just happened to have an OLED screen.
Oh my god, SEAR looks amazing on an OLED screen.