SEAR DevBlog, week of 9/28: Alpha Options screen!

Not nearly animated enough yet, but it's getting there.

I’ve only attended a couple cons and spoken to a handful of other indie devs, but I have noticed a bit of a repeating pattern when it comes to the options screen and main menu UI elements: they have a tendency to come along late. SEAR has not been immune to this phenomenon, but with the addition of the new engineer I mentioned a few weeks back, we finally have the options menu in! It’s not pretty yet, still got a very alpha feel which may persist through the playtest, but it lets you set your controls (the most important thing) and saves the values you give it, so it’s worlds better than nothing. And not a moment too soon, with the playtest right around the corner. 

Our Early Access launch date is unconfirmed still, but to hit the date I have in mind we need to get cranking on about 13 new phase-levels. To help hit that goal I’m bringing on a new level designer, which means we’ll have two of them. The long-term plan for SEAR involves a LOT of levels being made, and every SEAR level consists of 5-8 individual phase-levels, so I’ve always kind of thought this would be a necessary step eventually. 

On the topic of the playtest, I’m starting the Steam review process today. Once it’s back I should be able to commit to the actual date range for the playtest. We’re also having the happy problem of possibly verging into too many playtesters… this is a small build with only one level primarily aimed at getting feedback on the core concept, and from running out in the wild on a bunch of different machines. I actually don’t want it to go too large. If we do end up capping the number though we will announce it before turning anyone away. 

More soon!