This latest blog post is all about multiplayer and Major Chad!
Arguably the biggest gamechanger in all of SimplePlanes 2 is the built-in multiplayer. There’s so much fun to be had messing around with your friends (or with strangers!), and our playtesters have had a really good time with it.
Multiplayer is something that was possible in SimplePlanes 1 with a mod, but it was quite limited and unintuitive to use. Among its problems were hosting and joining lobbies, as the host needed to download a separate executable (potentially in addition to other stuff) as well as give people their IP address, and the person joining had to know the server info (often buried in an old forum somewhere) and input it in-game to join.
SP2 makes this process much simpler. From the main menu, simply click the multiplayer button and you’ll get a nifty server browser where you can host or join a multiplayer lobby in seconds. To host a lobby, click Create Server, set a name, maximum player count (you can play with up to 15 other players!), lobby privacy, and you’re set! Once in the game you can also set the server tick rate and a per-craft part count limit, as well as control the time of day, weather, and activities. To join a lobby, just click the join button on any of the listings in the server browser and click Join Server (if you’re playing on Steam you can also join your friends through the Steam overlay); you’ll immediately join the host and can start doing shenanigans together.
Once you’re in a multiplayer lobby, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want. Blow each other up, do challenges and races together, chill on the beach, or whatever else. If you open your menu, you can access a player list that lets you kick a player (if you’re the host), copy their craft (you can prevent people from copying your craft in the settings), or teleport next to them.
They say a picture speaks a thousand words, so I’ve compiled about 1300 “pictures” in the form of a montage rather than go into exhaustive detail on all that’s possible in multiplayer. Most of this footage was captured over the last few months by our playtesters (and as such includes some outdated content), and I think it captures the essence of multiplayer far better than I could. Enjoy :)
A common criticism we heard with Juno: New Origins in particular is that it lacked a certain charm to it. For a game with a focus on multiplayer like SP2, it seemed pretty important to address that criticism. Enter Major Chad, a peculiar person of many talents who serves as both the mascot for SP2 and as an avatar for the player.
To bring Chad to life, we brought in an expert: Alexandre Alin. Alexandre is a professional 3D character artist with well over a decade of experience, having worked on numerous high-profile projects including five Star Wars movies (plus a few episodes of The Mandalorian), Arrival, Pacific Rim, and more. We’ve been very fortunate to be able to collaborate with him, and the results are better than we ever could have hoped.
As an aside, he’s also a co-founder of a small Quebec-based team called Renart Studios, who are currently working on their own game. I’m sure he’d appreciate it if you checked them out :)
We asked him a bunch of questions for this post to get some insight into his creative process and other thoughts, which we’ll go through now in a nice and compact interview format:
What were your first impressions of SP2 when we first talked?
The first time I discovered SimplePlanes, I found it to be a truly unique game. I was impressed by the level of customization available for the planes. It immediately connected with my creative side. So, adding a character to that universe was something I found genuinely exciting.
What software did you use to bring him to life?
I used Maya for modelling and rigging, Substance Painter and Photoshop for texturing, and ZBrush for sculpting.
What was the most technically challenging part of the process?
The most technically challenging part of the project for me was keeping everything organised and clear. With many different rigged clothing pieces and multiple texture files, it would have been easy to lose track. But with new challenges come new opportunities for improvement. Working on Major Chad, I had to create some custom tools to speed up and simplify those repetitive tasks.
Facial expressions are a big part of Major Chad’s charm. How did you approach creating them?
Creating facial blendshapes is one of my favourite parts as a 3D character generalist. That’s where I get to bring the character’s personality to life, and every character is unique. The secret behind well-done blendshapes lies mostly in having clean, well-structured topology. Many artists shy away from topology because it’s considered technical—but once you’ve mastered it, it actually gives you more artistic freedom to create appealing and anatomically accurate expressions.
How does making a character for a video game compare to making one for a film?
The big difference lies in optimizing the model to run smoothly in a game engine. For Major Chad, the polygon count is much lower than for a movie character, and the deformation complexity is also reduced to ensure real-time performance. The challenge is to maintain a high-quality aesthetic despite those constraints.
If Major Chad were to be cast in a movie, who should play him?
Definitely Jim Carrey.
To complement his dashing looks, Chad has a diverse wardrobe that allows him to dress for any occasion whether it’s practical, formal, or casual.
In SP2 we have four outfits to choose from (for now), each one able to be recoloured to any set of colours you want in order to suit your needs (no pun intended), and some of them can even have certain elements added or removed entirely, like taking off a helmet or a jacket. There’s a surprising amount of diversity in what you can do with Chad’s customization, leading to a multiplayer experience where no one player looks quite the same, yet they all share the same recognizable character.
Chad doesn’t just stand around and look pretty, he serves as a means for you to interact with your craft and the game world in ways you never could before. He can walk, crouch, jump, swim, jankily push things around, and more!
Perhaps most importantly of all though is what happens when you give him a chair to sit in. First off, when you go into first-person the camera will gently tilt left or right as your craft rolls around to mimic the way a real person would tilt their head to match the horizon. This adds an extra layer of immersion to flying your crafts around, and if you don’t like it very much you can adjust its intensity in the game settings.
Next, we have “puppeteering”. What is puppeteering? Well aside from being a metaphor for Chad’s utter helplessness to the whims of the player (he doesn’t mind), it’s a way for you to define how Chad interacts with your craft when he’s sitting down. Using a process called inverse kinematics (don’t worry, you don’t have to know what that means), you can define a cockpit part for each of Chad’s hands, elbows, knees, and feet to stick to, and they’ll automatically move with those parts in a natural way (fun fact, at one point during development William had forgotten to make Chad’s limbs disconnect from things that are too far away, resulting in him being able to be stretched beyond recognition). This is a feature we had added in Juno to great success, but unlike a simple-minded Drood, Chad is able to wrap his fingers around certain parts to actually grab them when the need arises, unlike the hands just sort of awkwardly floating next to the part like in Juno.
Puppeteering helps make Chad more than just someone who sits idly in whatever seat you give him, and it will be an instrumental tool for properly scaling cockpits for VR whenever we implement support for it into SP2.
If messing around in multiplayer with your friends seems exciting to you, please consider the game! And if you want to see early sneak peeks of these blogs, consider joining our Discord Server!