Hello again! It’s been a few weeks since the last dev blog, as we took a break while you all were playing the demo (which we really hope you had fun with, we plan to do more in the future!) but we’re back with more.
We’re kicking things back off with something you may have already noticed a bit of in the demo: sound design. A lot of work has been done to make SimplePlanes 2 sound nicer than our previous games.
Due to this site not having a built-in video player, at the end of this post there will be a link to a YouTube video showing the subjects discussed in here.
User Interface
To start, Andrew has given the user interface (aka UI) a total auditory makeover, with every interaction now having a satisfying sound to it. You’ll notice little mouse clicks and other diegetic noises as you navigate the UI, which helps a lot in making it feel nice to use. It’s hard to talk about this with words, so I’ll let the video do the rest of the talking.
Part Sounds
Next up is the parts. Every sound emitted by parts in this game has received some much-needed love. In some cases this means simple processing improvements for existing sounds which you might or might not notice, and in other cases we’ve completely replaced sounds with new ones. All sounds now also fade with distance, such as the little clicks made by buttons in your cockpit.
One thing you’re likely to notice is the improvements to the Cannon part. Its firing sound is replaced by something that much more closely resembles what you’d expect a gunshot to sound like, but not only that; its sound also changes according to the properties of the part, so a relatively small autocannon is going to sound less powerful than a full-blown tank cannon. Perfect for letting other players in multiplayer know you mean business based on sound alone.
If you happened to check out the cockpit views of the stock crafts during the demo (if you didn’t, imagine I’m looking disapprovingly at you, because the cockpits are awesome), something else you might have noticed is that the first person view muffles audio now. By default, this is just a static effect that muffles all of the craft sound, but in your craft’s chair settings you can change the intensity of it. For the more advanced players, you can go a step further and use FunkyTrees to dynamically change the muffle intensity based on your craft inputs, allowing for sound to be muffled only when a canopy or door is closed.
Environment Sounds
As part of our effort to improve the overall immersion in the game, we’ve been working on environment sounds. As you might expect, these are sounds that play in the world that aren’t necessarily coming from the player and they help to make everything feel more alive.
To start, some parts of the map will have reverb, making all the sounds you hear loudly reverberate like you might expect in, say, the massive cave in Middleton.
Next, water is noisy now. When you’re next to a body of water you’ll notice a gentle sloshing from the waves, and when you go under there’s more sounds to, er, immerse you. I won’t apologize for the pun.
Video Showcase:
If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!