Racing first, rhythm second
Adam's gone back and forth for a long time on how much to use the word "rhythm" when describing SEAR. The term is useful shorthand and everyone immediately knows what it means, but it also carries a playstyle SEAR deliberately doesn't conform to, and the last thing you want is players arriving with the wrong expectations.
Talking to people who've played the game or are waiting on it, he's landed somewhere more practical: it doesn't really matter whether he uses the word or not, because people are going to use it regardless. So the useful move is to qualify it rather than dodge it. SEAR is high-speed racing with a splash of forgiving rhythm mechanics. The racing takes primary consideration, every time.
The reswave problem
Which brings the post to reswaves, and a design problem largely of Adam's own making.
A reswave is an opt-in speed boost, cued by a moment in the music. Catching one should never demand frame-perfect timing, so the input window is deliberately generous. The complication is that the boost itself has to land with the song. If it fires late, it feels wrong, which means the absolute latest you can hit the SEAR button is directly on the beat.
So the window is there, and nobody wants it. Every instinct pulls you back onto the beat anyway, Adam's included.
We could give players the window, but we couldn't force them to use it.
That's the contradiction part one lays out in full: a forgiving system that players psychologically refuse, and why a mechanic built to respect the music kept quietly turning into a beat-matching requirement. There's a fix coming. Part two covers it.
Also this fortnight
No headline features shipped across the weeks of 9/7 and 9/14, but work continued on NPC AI, level loading and the leaderboard systems.
Read the full devblog, including the working-out behind the reswave timing:
What's In a Reswave? Part One
Devblogs land every couple of weeks. Follow SEAR here on Steam to catch them, or join the Discord to talk to Adam directly: discord.gg/GT8cfZUmRW