SEAR DevBlog, week of 7/6/26: Tutorial Revamp

The new lesson introduction screen in the tutorial

As expected I was able to get back in the project this week, and it was nice. I worked on improving the player experience for the laserfire reswave, which currently does a fairly terrible job of explaining to the player how it ties in to the music. I’m not done yet, but it already aligns an animation in the reticle with the synth hits in the music much better which helps a lot.

The laserfire reswave is a fairly specific mechanic for how much time I’ve spent on it throughout the project’s lifespan so far, but I’ve learned a ton working on it and have tried to keep the functionality as scalable as possible as I build it out. I’m still not happy with where it’s at, but it gets closer to the ideal every time I work on it. 

Planning to spend a bit more time on that next week, and then move on to some AI tweaks. The AI in the game right now was the result of basically one week of crunch work ahead of a submission deadline that we missed last year. It was the bare minimum to get the NPC vehicles moving, and the problem with bare minimum functionality is that it’s way too easy to just keep relying on it. It’s done well enough for basic testing purposes so far, but it’s time to polish it up so all the vehicles can start a phase next to each other and the NPCs can actually - gasp - overtake the player. Madness, I know, but that’s the goal.

Beyond that this week consisted of the usual array of admin tasks and marketing management. We did see some modest growth in wishlist count this week and had some folks drop in to the community discord, which was great. Always enjoy talking about music for SEAR in there : ) 

Oh, and the tutorial overhaul is functional and in the game! This implements a bunch of suggestions and realizations that came out of VGMCon back in April. We’re still tweaking the final presentation but again, the baseline changes are all in. Excited to try it out at 2DCon in August, and at Mall of America in July. 

Oh yeah, SEAR will be on display at Mall of America July 25 in the rotunda! They have a huge screen there which should be featuring gameplay and/or trailers. Hopefully SEAR will be up on that at some point. I’ll take some video.