SEAR DevBlog, week of 9/29: Making Needle behave itself

One of the things I really want to have done by the end of this month for the public-facing prototype is a long-overdue revamp of the vehicle physics. This has been something we've been working at on and off all year, but a general dissatisfaction with the way the vehicle felt finally prompted me to bring on a consultant who's worked with the UE physics engine for years.

In short, the vehicle has been using a sphere as its root physics primitive, which is causing all kinds of issues: severe bounciness, weird collision problems, runtime lag between the vehicle's apparent collision silhouette's location and the vehicle's actual location, severe instability at higher speeds, and all kinds of stuff. We've managed this to date by dialing speed down and modifying level layouts - i.e., working around the problem - but it's not a good long-term solution. My hope is we'll have at least the first round of fixes ready this month. Nothing will leave a bad taste in players' mouths like a vehicle prone to flipping wildly.

We've also been working on a little system to increase the reward for hitting multiple boostpads in a row, where each successive boostpad produces a little more extra umph than the last. We may or may not keep this - we need to code it before I can see how it feels - but the idea has promise, I think, and is worth checking out.

Otherwise I was still waist-deep in financials for a lot of this week. Made the decision to hold off on the website revamp. I still really want a nicer website, but the physics takes priority, and unfortunately the budget just doesn't support both right now.

No firm date on the Kickstarter yet, though March is looking increasingly likely.

Further bulletins as events warrant.