Devlog #20: The world finally sounds alive (and the crows are fair game)

Until now Beyond was a quiet place. You could walk through a whole town and hear nothing but your own gunshots. This update is about fixing that: footsteps, a living soundscape, a soundtrack, and something new circling overhead.

We also did a full playtest on the new build, and the whole thing is up on YouTube.

Footsteps that know what you're standing on

• Every surface sounds different: concrete, gravel, dirt, wood, metal and water each have their own steps. Walking off the road into the forest sounds like twigs and dirt, and crossing a metal floor rings.
• Walk, run and land: walking, running, strafing and landing from a jump all get their own sounds.
• Other players can hear you: footsteps carry about 30 metres. Sneaking up on someone means slowing down.

A world with weather in your ears

• Day and night: birdsong and wind through the trees during the day, crickets at night.
• Inside is quieter: step into a building and the outside noise drops away.
• Weather drives it: the ambience follows the sky system, so the time of day changes how the world sounds.

A soundtrack

• Explore music: five slow, moody tracks play while you're scavenging, fading in gently instead of starting all at once.
• Combat music: when a fight starts the music switches to something heavier, and it eases back to the explore music a few seconds after things calm down.
• Main menu: the menu now has its own track.
• All free to use: every track is CC0, so they're cleared for the finished game. Composers are listed in our credits. These are placeholders while we look at a proper score, and the music volume is in the options.

Crows

The animal pack we use had a crow in it, but nothing to make it fly. So we built that ourselves.

• Flocks of four to seven: they circle 15 to 30 metres up, flapping and gliding, and cawing now and then.
• They land: every so often the flock drops down to peck around and hop about on the ground.
• They spook: get too close while they're on the ground and the whole flock bursts into the air with alarm calls.
• You can shoot them: a crow that's hit tumbles out of the sky, and the rest of the flock scatters. Kill a whole flock and another one turns up later.

Hunting crows: meat and feathers

• What they drop: a shot crow drops raw meat and one to three feathers next to the body.
• New Feather item: feathers are a new resource, and they stack.
• Arrows need feathers now: the arrow recipe is now 3 wood, 1 scrap metal and 2 feathers for 5 arrows. Crows are your fletching supply.
• Raw meat finally looks like meat: it was a grey placeholder cube until now. It's now a proper raw T-bone, both on the ground and in your inventory.

Playtest: 23 October

We took the new build for a 27-minute run: scavenging the towns, driving, pushing into the gas, and fighting. This run also had a set of earned tattoos on the character, so you can see how the ink looks in normal play rather than in close-up screenshots.

Watch the full playtest on YouTube

What's not tested yet

• Crows in multiplayer: each player sees their own flock for now. Shared flocks come later.
• Crows and trees: they can fly through tree tops. On the list.
• Footsteps on every surface: the main ones are checked in game. Some odd surfaces may still fall back to the default concrete sound.

What's next

• Feedback from this playtest
• A cooked meat model to match the raw one
• More animal and world sounds