SEAR DevBlog week of 7/7: Enter the BDB

The Beat-drift Boost, caught in the act

I now know my way around UE5, and the SEAR project specifically, well enough that when the Beat-drift boost idea occurred to me at around 11:30 Sunday night, I was able to code up a passable version of it in a little under an hour.

See, last weekend I was able to stamp out the last of the truly nasty performance bugs that had been plaguing us since May. So with the awful phase 6-entry stutter eliminated and the FPS in phases 3 and 4 finally reliably north of 60 in the editor build, I played the living hell out of SEAR. That is the best way, I've found, to get a good sense of how the game is feeling, what it's still missing, and what it really needs next. We have a number of visual and mechanical level-based things in the hopper to heighten the feeling of "being in" the music, but the idea that occurred to me Sunday night was something more fundamental.

Drift has been in the game for months, and it works great. But the plan was always to add a miniboost system, ala your typical karting game, where if you drift long enough and feather the stick right, you get a variable miniboost that, at its strongest, can rival or surpass a use of turbo. I had planned to more-or-less do this exactly the way kart games did it, but somewhere in the middle of my 20-odd rapid-fire games of SEAR I realized there was a better way - the beat-drift boost (or BDB for short). Essentially, while you are drifting (and IF THERE IS A BEAT IN THE SONG - this is critical), your side engines change colors once on each beat. Each time that happens, you build a level of miniboost which will activate when you come out of the drift.

Keep in mind that the associated visuals are still a work in progress. When the engines flash four times, each a different color, the BDB is building - when they return to red, the boost is activated. You'll hear the engine whine up, see the FOV shift out, and see the speedometer (bottom right) jump. The final effect will also include a modest colored flame jet from the side engines. But enough caveats, here's what it looks like in action:

I can't really overstate how enormous a difference this makes to the gameplay, and to the music immersion. I'm really excited about it.

It provides the player a direct way to interact with the music, on their own terms, which doesn't involve hitting a button on a beat but still very much feels like you're "riding" the music. It injects a much-needed skill element that the game was lacking up until now - as with any good kart-racer, a good player will be going for every opportunity to get a drift boost. And it's immensely satisfying to pull off, especially in conjunction with the Resboosts that come directly from the music which you have to catch, navigating around opponents and into boostpads, and hitting turbos to pick up the rare moment of slack. It feels like just about the perfect amount of speed mechanics competing for your attention - one that's resource-gated (the turbos), one that's available all the time if you can pull it off (BDB), and one that hits when the music says it hits (resboosts).

The fact that it is tied directly to the music's beat also means that the song for the level becomes even more of a direct influence in how that level is designed and how it plays. Lala is 122 BPM, but I have songs in mind with tempos as slow as 65 BPM - approximately half the tempo. That will pretty much require the level design to provide long, slow turns that encourage long, slow drifts to get the max BDB levels - fascinatingly, very similar to the type of racetracks I already felt the song was telling me it wanted. But I love that this mechanic will encourage the song to drive the level design so directly.

So this was an awesome development this week, even if I did take a week off from my planned development tasks to work on it. It was well worth it.

As of two days ago the game was in a state that I would've been comfortable - not happy, but comfortable - shipping it as the prototype. Which is awesome news. It means the next two months are for sanding down the hard edges, getting more of the effects in that we want, and finalizing as many of the extra features we want to showcase as possible. It feels great to be so ahead of the game (no pun intended). Full speed ahead to September.