SEAR DevBlog week of 7/21: My favorite car

The night my baby came home.

Indulging in a bit of self-reflection this week because it was a tough one.

That guy up there was named Vhesus. He was the best car I ever had. Fully electric, 320hp (not a Ferrari, but plenty for my needs), fully paid off. The most incredible sound system I've ever owned, in or outside of a vehicle. That's the car I was driving, the sound system I was listening to, when all the details for SEAR finally came together on a 26-hour road trip.

I'm not really a car guy, I don't follow car news or make a whole Sunday out of lovingly buffing and waxing my vehicles or anything like that. But I loved this damn car. It was a joy to drive. I would go places locally just to drive around in it. It turned every little errand around town into a pleasure.

Saturday night I hit a deer and totaled it.

I spent a whole lot of my hours this week dealing with the fallout from that, meaning I didn't get nearly as much time on the project as I would've liked. The team came through like they always do and kept pushing everything forward, so that was great. And I found, as I often have over the past year, that SEAR blunted the edges of a tough situation once again. I've often said this is the most fulfilling job I've ever had, even if I'm not currently getting paid for it, and that was certainly the case this week.

By the numbers: the placeholder for the transition screen is in, and you can see it in the gameplay video for this week. Emphasis on placeholder. But it gets the basic point across of what we're going to be doing for those phase transitions in the prototype. That part I did manage to get coded.

We also had more bug fixes, new vfx related to the Beatdrift Boost (finished but not yet implemented), more level design work, more progress on the box art. It was a good week for SEAR progress.

And as I was driving home in something else one day, reflecting on the lost Vhesus and how much I had loved that car, it occurred to that while it remained the best physical car I had ever owned, it's possible that it actually wasn't my favorite car anymore, and hadn't been for about a year. There's another car I love driving almost as much, that I can tinker under the hood with, where the music is always excellent and I can enjoy driving and listening to music at the same time just as much if not more. And I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this, but that car is this one:

Talk to you next week.