As some of you may know, Steam Next Fest started yesterday, which is a week-long event Steam runs a few times a year where tons of game developers publish demos of their upcoming games. As you probably also know, the SimplePlanes 2 Demo isn’t a part of it. We would have loved to participate in this Next Fest, but the Flight Demo just wasn’t ready in time. However, though the demo isn’t ready right now, we promised it would be in October and we intend to keep that promise, so without further ado, you’ll be able to play the demo on…

October 27

That’s just under two weeks from now! This demo will be available for a week, and as a reminder it will offer a limited part of the SimplePlanes 2 experience, with:
* A “read-only” designer, where you can look around and load our new stock crafts or your old SimplePlanes 1 crafts and paint them, but can’t add or modify parts.
* Driftwood Island, a small island east of the main isles densely packed with points of interest, including a race track. Attempting to venture too close to the main islands will result in your demise via missiles.
* Numerous activities to play by yourself or with friends, including races, PvP deathmatches, and more.

To gain access to the demo as soon as it’s available, head on over to our Steam page, find the “Join the SimplePlanes 2 Playtest” section just under the game overview, and click “Request Access”. When the demo comes out, it will immediately be added to your Steam library so you can just download and play! We’re also steadily ramping up playtesting for the demo version, so if you click that button you may get randomly selected to help test stuff a little bit early :)

In order to put our full focus on getting things ready, we’re pausing our regular developer showcases for a little bit – we’ll be back with another dev blog shortly before the demo is out, and then it’ll be in your own hands. We’re really excited to finally let you all play the game, even if it’s only in a relatively limited capacity. We hope you have fun, the wait won’t be too much longer.

One last thing. Although we weren’t able to participate in it ourselves, if you’re looking for new stuff to play or just want something to hold you over for a little bit before the 27th, we do highly encourage checking out what Next Fest has to offer, and wishlisting anything you end up enjoying. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there made by lots of great game developers, it’s all free, and you might just find something you really like. There’s a couple demos I’d like to personally shout out:

Hijong Park’s Defender Patrol

A low poly flight simulator where you fly an MD-500MG, a cute little armed scout helicopter that would eventually be developed into the iconic Little Bird. It has a very interactive cockpit, and although it’s playable in flatscreen I highly recommend trying it in VR if you’re able to as it’s really fun there.

In The Black

For any hard sci-fi nerds who may be reading this, In The Black is kind of a dream come true. It’s a realistic first-person spaceship combat simulator where you have to fly around using actual orbital mechanics. It’s not like flying a plane where you can just change directions on a dime; if you want to change the direction you’re moving or come to a stop, you’d better be prepared to manually cancel your velocity by burning in the opposite direction.

Nobody at Jundroo is affiliated with these games or any of their developers, I just think they’re cool and worth a shoutout.

That’s all for now, thanks for your patience and we’ll see you soon.