SEAR DevBlog, week of 9/1: There's my girl

Resa lights the way.

Massive, massive, massive week. First draft on the tutorial levels is done. Song maps are done for the tutorial levels. The results screen is in, with functionality for most of the buttons going in tonight or over the weekend. We've been able to sneak in tons of cool little visual effects. Several annoying bugs that have been around for months have been stomped out. We're producing shipping builds daily. I honestly finished so much functionality today that I can't even remember what I was working on at the beginning of the week.

Today I knocked out a bug that has been hanging on for months that caused the res boosts to be the wrong duration, which really messed with the feel as they are supposed to be tied to the music element that spawns them. Now they're linked correctly and I'm honestly amazed at how much of a difference it makes. In the ice plain you can make strategic decisions about which craters to blast through/over based on what part of the music is playing and the feeling when you pull it off is pretty exhilarating (at least if you're the designer?).

But the biggest implementation for me this week is that girl up at the top - the resonator dish, or Resa (Ray-za) if you'd like to refer to her by name. Her animations are finally in, she's popping up when she's supposed to most of the time, and she signals when a reswave is coming just like she's supposed to. I'm still not completely in love with the specific presentation we're using right now - we're going to play with a bunch of different options for how she shows the player they need to hit the SEAR button soon - but the fact that everything is happening when it's supposed to, driven by the song map, and is fully animated means that we finally have the luxury of working on the details.

Coolest of all, I have a bunch of lines from our voice actress that I haven't had a chance to review yet, but last time we went over things she found a really cool sound layer and we struck a good note on tone as well. If things continue going as well as they currently are, Resa will have several voice lines in the tutorial level to help players figure out what they're doing as they get started with SEAR.

We had a shipping build last week, but this week we have an even stronger one. By end of next week it should have everything we were aiming for, and that still leaves a grace week before the Epic submission deadline.

Last week Wix crapped out on me while I was trying to upload the new gameplay video, but hopefully this week it'll let me finish. Naturally the phase timer in the bottom left bugged and I didn't notice until after I'd taken the video, but there's many other things going right that I just kept it. If I don't get it posted on the site here, it'll be out in the Discord shortly.