SEAR DevBlog week of 7/28: Enter lore, stage right

Needle, starting to phase out.

We finished our first draft of a SEAR box art candidate this week, and it missed the mark. It was modeled off of the norm for most racing games, but what I realized after we finished and weren't happy with the result was that I... am... not terribly impressed with the box art for most racing games. I had reservations before I posted it up in the Discord for community feedback, but the feedback confirmed them. It had a retro vibe, it looked like a space combat game, and there was not a lot of motion in the still, despite our best efforts. These were all the wrong impressions, so we went all the way back to the drawing board.

That was momentarily frustrating, perhaps. But this came at a really good time, a kind of nexus moment. At the same time we started over on the box art, we were working on a placeholder super-short load screen for the phase transitions in game, as well as some animations that depict objects "glitching out" or turning pixelated as they vanish. I was also fishing for some cool animations for a big website facelift later this month or next. All of this kind of plays into the setting of the game, a topic which I haven't really talked about much or delved into too much and had kind of assumed took a far rear seat to the music integration features. Which it does... kind of... but lore drives art design, and therein lies the rub.

So here's the basic working idea of the game lore. You pilot this vehicle through mysterious digital spaces and environments. They are interpreted dynamically and digitally created based on the emotional resonance of a location or event, and they provide a glimpse into something important - maybe a deep emotion, maybe an event from the past, maybe a dream. Each level is one of these places, and the race represents an effort to delve as deeply into this place as possible. Within the lore, the further you (the pilot) travel into the level, the more data you acquire. And there is some kind of time window or restrictive element to these data dives - they're open rarely and briefly, so multiple pilots try to delve them at once.

So the important takeaway from this right now, future campaign modes notwithstanding, is that visual design needs to reflect this fundamental lore. Whatever Needle is, wherever it is driving, it is always a digital construct within a digital space - literally, of course, but also within the game world. And this creates the framework for some potentially very cool visuals and art language which can easily form the basis for our Art Bible and design approach, which will inform everything from the title screen to the website. Particularly the process of "phasing in", whereby the level is constructed around the pilots and/or the pilots are digitally assembled within it.

The image at the top there is a quickie AI-generated concept which we'll build off of, improve, and expand. (For the record, my concept artist generated the image, along with several others as we worked through our approach.) It gets at the basic idea of how these vehicles may look in the earliest stages of phasing out, just to illustrate it. From here we iterate and improve.

In the real world this is all driven, of course, by the phase-based and time-limited nature of the gameplay, which in turn is driven directly by the music mechanics of the game. So utilizing this imagery and leaning into this idea lets us demonstrate how this racing game is unique based on its music incorporation, without directly relying on musical imagery (which, as I've mentioned before, I don't think would be wise).

I could say getting this stuff sorted is long overdue, but like so many other things, it kind of had to grow organically out of the development process. I'm glad it's arriving when it is and I'm really excited about evolving it over the coming weeks, especially as our in-game and in-real-world assets start to incorporate it more.