SEAR DevBlog, week of 8/24/26: Playtest #1 is on the way!
As promised, two big updates this week.
First is the announcement of our first Steam Playtest, which you can sign up for directly on the Steam page! (Remember to wishlist while you’re out there!) The date range on the playtest is still TBD as of right now, but I will share it the moment we have it.
We’re getting closer to beta every day, but the playtest will be a relatively early build of the game which may still be missing some of the options menu items and UI bells and whistles we need to have in place for the demo. But the core gameplay experience of phased racing through song segments will be there, and we need to get some more player feedback on how that feels to play before we go too deep in to the new levels we’re developing for Early Access. It’ll also be good to get data from the game running on different systems out in the wild.
The Playtest version of the game will be the single level Last Days of Zala. We’re planning to have the Leaderboards up and running for the test, and will have some kind of reward for top finishers – but only once we get a good reward for Vibers as well. More details on that as we get everything sorted, and suggestions are welcome!
Now for the second announcement – we will not be running a Kickstarter, at least not this year.
In approximately 5 weeks of a/b testing aimed at gauging 1) player interest in SEAR, and 2) potential backer interest in a Kickstarter, we saw a lot of strong results for the first and more tepid results for the second. The data was strong enough to both bolster the idea that there’s definitely an audience for this game and make it clear that running a Kickstarter simultaneously with getting the word out about the game would be a significant risk.
When I started this adventure last year, crowdfunding stood out at to me as the most viable way to get SEAR made, but a number of things have changed since then. For one, I’ve realized the extent to which Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general tends to work better for tabletop games than video games. For another, I ended up putting more money into the project than originally planned, which should enable us to hit Early Access off the self-funding alone.
I won’t rule out the possibility of running a Kickstarter in the future, particularly once there is a bigger community for SEAR that would be able to back it without a large independent advertising campaign. But I also don’t want to run a Kickstarter if we don’t have to. I’d much prefer to have people buy a product they can play immediately if we are able to do that. Call me old-fashioned that way. If we need the funding in order to get something done, I’ll look at it again, but I’m hopeful we won’t.
Progress updates for the game itself for this last week:
Rough, art-free draft of the Options screen is now in game.
Art for the Options UI is underway and should be wrapped this week.
First pass on song mapping for one of the Early Access levels was completed – I am insanely excited about some of the stuff we are doing with this song and I can’t wait to share all the details with you, the song itself, the group behind it, the level design and the transitions…. if we can make it half as cool as it looks in my head, it’ll knock your socks off : )
In-game work on the redesigned resonator really took off and we have a working in-game model now. Not hooked up to any logic yet, but it’s looking really good so far. I’ll have a full blog post on this and maybe a little video as well in the future.
We settled on PlayFab for our leaderboard housing and general multiplayer infrastructure. I figure if it’s good enough for Street Fighter 6 it’s probably good enough for us.
No progress on the NPC AI or my other in-game tasks unfortunately, as it was a short week for me and I had to focus on communication around the Playtest and Kickstarter, and then only had a half week due to travel. Hoping to have a lot more updates on the AI rewrite next week!
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