Aaron Preece
Until recently, using audio alone to indicate verticality in 3D games was difficult to do in a way that felt intuitive or usable. With HRTF (Head-related transfer function) now widely available through traditional headphones, far more options exist for giving players a sense of height and depth. Even so, many audio games still rely on a more traditional approach: a flat, 2D playfield that is presented to the player as if it were a full 3D space through careful sound design. This technique goes back to the early 2000s with titles such as Shades of Doom by GMA Games, one of the first audio-based first-person shooters. Later favorites like Aprone's Swamp and A Hero's Call by Out-of-Sight Games continued refining this approach. All of these titles look two-dimensional from a visual perspective but are experienced by the player as three-dimensional through audio.
A more recent example that shows how effective this idea can be is New Horizons by Freeman69, a space trading and combat game with 10,000 star systems arranged in a 100-by-100 grid. The underlying map is flat, and each stellar body is simply a circle on that plane. Yet when playing from the first-person cockpit view, the sound design makes it feel like you are flying up and over planets, passing beneath other ships, and weaving through debris in genuine 3D space. The audio consistently creates the sensation of height even though none exists visually.
Exploring and Identifying Objects
New Horizons uses a mixture of speech and spatial audio to keep you oriented. Any large stellar body you are facing is identified immediately, no matter the distance, and you can request its distance with a shortcut. Smaller interactable objects, such as loose cargo containers, rocks, or enemy craft, are detected only when they move within 300 distance units of your ship.
To support this, you have a narrow-beam short-range radar that plays a sound when an object enters range and announces both its type and distance. This radar is one of the core tools for gathering cargo, locating hostile vessels, and lining up shots on asteroids or debris.
An additional scanning radar is also available as optional ship equipment. This radar sweeps an arc of about 180 degrees in front of you, almost like using a cane. As it passes over objects, it plays a continuous tone, deeper for larger objects and higher for smaller ones. Unlike the short-range radar, it helps you build a sense of the full environment around you, not just what happens to fall directly in front of your ship. For new players this tool can be extremely helpful when learning how the game communicates size, distance, and layout without relying on visuals.
Navigation and Travel Between Systems
Navigation within a star system uses sublight engines, and the speed of micrometeors whizzing past your hull gives you a direct sense of how fast you're traveling. Slower speeds result in fewer and softer impacts, while a fast ship at full throttle produces a constant rush of particles streaking by. To simplify long-distance travel within a system, you also have an overdrive engine that moves you thousands of units per second, making it easy to reach distant planets or moons in moments.
Travel between star systems uses vortexes, temporary wormholes that your ship creates between adjacent systems. Natural one-way wormholes also exist throughout the galaxy and can shorten multi-system journeys considerably. Even though the galaxy contains thousands of systems, the presence of wormholes typically keeps long trips between twenty and thirty jumps.
When facing any of the eight cardinal directions, you can hold a shortcut to hear details about the adjacent system. For distant destinations, the autopilot will plot the shortest route, often steering you through natural wormholes to reduce the number of jumps required. This setup makes it possible to freely explore while still letting you quickly locate specific points of interest across the grid.
Atmospheric Effects and Stellar Bodies
Each type of stellar body has its own background sounds. Stars, gas giants, lifeless planetoids, and Earth-like worlds all produce distinct ambient audio when you enter their atmospheres. While inside a stellar body, the micrometeors that normally streak silently past you in space will instead ping off your hull, giving a second layer of feedback about where you are.
To find the nearest exit from within a planet or similar object, you simply turn until you hear a noticeable high-pitched double tone. Since every stellar body is circular, this works from any point inside the object.
Combat and Threat Awareness
Combat is one of the most active parts of New Horizons. Enemy ships are identified by your short-range radar using a higher-pitched beep than the tone used for ordinary objects. When an enemy fires at you, the sound of its laser striking your hull starts at a low pitch and climbs as your ship takes more damage.
Your own laser produces a constant firing sound, but when you are correctly lined up on a target, a deeper underlying tone plays at the same time. This tone rises as you deal damage and eventually meets the pitch of the laser itself, indicating the enemy ship has been destroyed. When ships explode, debris scatters in all directions, clanging off your hull or whipping past you with a different texture than standard micrometeors. These touches make combat feel hectic and tactile without relying on visuals.
A detail worth keeping with the rest of the combat mechanics is the audio beacon attached to enemy ships that fire upon you. As soon as an enemy hits you, the game assigns a steady tone to that ship. If the ship is behind you, the tone is deeper, which makes turning to face the attacker much easier even if it has slipped outside your radar range.
Final Thoughts
New Horizons is free to download and play, and it remains one of the games I return to most often. The combination of simple visuals and detailed audio creates a space flight experience that is easy to learn yet surprisingly deep. If you enjoy science fiction or are looking for ideas to help guide audio design in your own projects, it is well worth trying. If you are interested how the game actually sounds, I have put together a quick video demonstrating some bounty hunting and asteroid mining to illustrate the game's soundscape here.
