SEAR DevBlog, week of 8/18: Moving right along

Concepting for box art is fun.

Abbreviated, pre-scheduled update this week as I will be traveling the next four days, so I'm writing this one ahead of time.

Lukas is working on art asset implementation, which is a new step for him (one I know he'll excel at) and fills a vital gap in our current art-to-production pipeline. There's nothing worse than having an awesome art asset sitting in the Staging folder because you just haven't had time to get it running in game yet. He also created this bad boy this week which we will be using to spawn in the player vehicle (and probably AI vehicles as well):

Maya continues to crank on box art concepts, as you can see at the top of the screen. The impression of speed is far stronger on these new images. We'll have a pretty wide spread of options which will be great as we'll have plenty of use for extra art that doesn't make it on to the actual box. I'd still like to land on one that more clearly shows the idea of transitioning between locations, which is driven by the music, but I gotta say there is something about the overall impression of a technical/computer-ish environment and the sheer speed of the image above that keeps bringing my eye back to it.

Chandler kicked all the ass this last week with major updates to several phases, including a couple that we were able to put a bow on and mark finished. Huge steps. As of today he turns his attention to designing the geometry and base aesthetics for the tutorial level. It is really exciting finally being able to start working on a new level!

Jorge almost has the Results screen and the UI input context functionality wrapped, after which he'll be starting on the load and title screens. Seeing these finishing touches start appearing around the game level experience at runtime is pretty exciting. It really feels like moving into a production environment.

Mayank continues toiling behind the scenes hunting and slaying shipping build bugs. Absolutely critical work. The shipping build is an entirely new animal with entirely new bugs and he's knocked out about half a dozen so far.

Stephanie and I did some work on tone-setting for the voice acting, though I think that will probably end up being more of a demo thing - it has a lot of potential to harm the experience if implemented poorly, and I want to make sure it gets the time it needs to be done right.

I have been working on designing the tutorial, finishing up the opening cinematic and some overdue transition management changes, and directing the team. I also hired a physics consultant to help us solve some lingering physics issues with vehicle stability and a web designer to make our website pretty. Judging a game by its website is kind of like judging a book by its cover - it gives a false impression of the product's quality, but people do it all the time anyway.

If you haven't seen it yet, there's a new gameplay video on the SEAR page. At two days old it is already out of date, but it still showcases a lot of the changes that have happened over the last couple weeks.

See you next week.