SEAR DevBlog, week of 8/31/26: Resonator Evolved

The hologram in question.

I mentioned the revised Resonator last week. This thing is the last piece of a puzzle we’ve been assembling since the project started, and I thought this week I’d talk a bit about that. 

In the in-game universe of SEAR, a place which I hope will get more fleshed out with time, there is something actually happening in any given game level. The participants are there for a reason, pursuing a goal. The digital transition of the vehicle from one space to another represents a particular event related to pursuing that goal. And the song itself represents the “resonance” of the Echo, a kind of short-lived singularity which entities will dive into as far as they can for various reasons which are their own. 

Without going too deep into the lore here, the idea is that every vehicle, every Echo diver, has a Resonator - a machine whose function is to translate the Echo’s resonance into elements that can be seen, heard, and navigated in order to facilitate diving as deeply into that Echo as possible in the time available. 

We’ve introduced the concept of Reswaves on the Steam page and elsewhere. Game-wise, these are the “forgiving rhythm mechanic” part of of the game. Press the SEAR button any time during an extremely lenient input window and you’ll catch the reswave, securing its effect (most commonly a speed boost, but in the demo level also potentially a laser shot or a period of light in an otherwise dark environment). But lore-wise, Reswaves are moments of intensity that come directly from the resonance itself. Again, here, the Resonator is the device that catches that resonance and translates it into its in-game effect. 

I originally envisioned some kind of satellite or antenna that would serve this purpose, and we pursued that vision pretty far. The original player vehicle model, Needle, was extremely analog in this regard and even has a physical animation for a door that opens for the dish to come out of. It pops up when a Reswave is on the way, and stows away again when not in use. To try to further explain the process, the actual resonance effect itself also came out of the dish, so it was both receiving resonance from thin air and expelling the resulting game effect. In practice I’m not sure this story was as clear as it seemed like it should be.

And the physical dish had a very retro feel in practice. When we redesigned the main player vehicle from the ground up, part of what we did was to interrogate this entire resonance-to-effect pipeline. We had the game mechanics working. But for the lore to be communicated we needed a clear visual story. 

To make the Resonator feel more sleek and less like a physical object, we transformed it into a hologram that essentially hovers directly above the resonance intake port of the vehicle. It became a kind of holographic lightning rod that sense resonance and draws it in, but it can change its presentation at any given moment due to its holographic nature, retaining a basic “listening” state when there is no Reswave coming, transforming into a funnel or other shape when a Reswave is incoming, making the whole much more dynamic.

So far so good, but we also needed to complete that story. The Resonator catches the reswave… then what? Well, the energy flows through transmission lines that actually rest just beneath the vehicle chassis, but glow brightly enough that you can see them through the chassis when they are channeling resonance (or priming to do so). These lines run to emitters positioned around the vehicle which emit the final effect. 

So the visual story now is: Reswave (patterns in the air which pull toward the vehicle) -> Resonator -> Transmission lines -> Emitters which produce the final result. 

This is working great right now for Speedboost reswaves, less so for lights, and getting there for the laserfire. But the bigger issue is that the central piece of this story - the Resonator hologram - wasn’t present at all. 

Now it is. 

This still needs to be hooked up to all the logic that will drive the state and its transitions, and there are a couple bugs yet to be worked out. But it’s pretty cool after nearly a year of design work to see this thing running in game.