Be Excellent To Each Other

The life and times of LUFTRAUSERS, out tomorrow on PS3 and PS Vita

Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail on his dogfighting epic’s long and winding road to launch

Many of you that have visited one of the countless videogame events we’ve attended around the world will already have played the spectacular 2D dogfighting game that is LUFTRAUSERS. We started the project halfway through 2011, when Jan Willem at Vlambeer was staring out of a window on a late flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam after the annual Game Developers Conference. He decided he wanted to expand on a little prototype we made back in 2010.

The pitch Jan Willem had for me was simple: the prototype had been made in two days, but had been played by hundreds of thousands of people. Jan Willem felt we might’ve run into something special with the simple high score game we had released for free to the internet. We started working on an improved version of our little 2D dogfighting game in just four colours.

We made a deal not to play the original until the new version was as good as we remembered the original to be, and were surprised at how much of a struggle it was to get LUFTRAUSERS to feel as good as we remembered the original.

We added bigger explosions, we worked on a dynamic camera system that would always try and track where the most action was, we added trails of smoke on crashing jets, and we even added extra colours to the palette. It still took us almost a month to achieve the same level of speed, of chaos, and of impact that the far simpler original had.

When we played the original again for the first time, we were baffled. Compared to the early builds of LUFTRAUSERS we’d been playing, the old version had become completely stale. You know that effect you have when you’re talking about a really old game that you love, and when you play it it turns out to not be that great? That’s because your memories of a game are not as much about what actually happens on screen, but about how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking while playing them. Our original game made people feel like the best fighter pilot in the world, as if they skimmed right over the water line taking out a squadron of enemy fighters. LUFTRAUSERS actually allowed you to do that.

In other words, we decided to commit to the game. We were still dealing with a whole bunch of nonsense from when our iOS title Ridiculous Fishing was cloned, so instead of going fully independent on this title, we reached out to our good friends at Devolver Digital to help us out. They looked at it, nodded sagely and proceeded to send a contract for us to sign without question. LUFTRAUSERS was signed.

Shahid Ahmad at SCEE was next on our list of people we wanted to talk to. We loved working with him on Super Crate Box for PlayStation Mobile, so we met up with him in a little food place just across from the SCEE offices in England. He asked what we were working on and we pitched LUFTRAUSERS to him. Shahid, without exaggeration, proceeded to negotiate with us on the spot, scribbled down the name of the game on a coaster, added a few terms to the thing and went back to the offices.

The developer kits for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita arrived pretty much within the week. We expanded the team on LUFTRAUSERS with additional programmers. We thought we’d be good to hit the spring of 2012. That turned out to be overly hopeful.

Vlambeer has made games for PC and for iOS – successful games, games that won awards and boasted hundreds of thousands of players. Console development is a completely new story for us though. We needed time to adapt, to figure out how to make things not just work, but make them work perfectly. On PC, the variety of configurations means you just sort of have to accept that it won’t work exactly the same on every computer. With a console, you have the one exact specification and there’s this automatic urge to make everything flawless. In a strange way, it’s kind of addictive.

We got stuck in that little loop of trying to make LUFTRAUSERS better for almost a year and a half, and we started showing what was essentially a finished game at events around the world. If you’re a fan of ours, chances are that you’ve played the game and talked to us at one of those events. We took your feedback home, and we’d polish the game a bit more before taking it out to the next event.

Instead of one airplane, LUFTRAUSERS suddenly allowed you to build 125 airplanes; and instead of one pumping KOZILEK soundtrack the game now features one for every airplane you can build. The amount of enemies doubled, the amount of colours doubled, the amount of effects quadrupled, and mechanically we added missions and combos to the game.

We had scoped small, but we knew we weren’t doing the game justice that way. We kept working as the launch date slipped, and then the new launch date slipped as well. We weren’t quite where we wanted yet. Eventually, it became 2013, and people stopped giving suggestions on how they’d improve the game at events. We were ready to wrap up.

PlayStation would quickly check for certification issues, so we had to go through ‘cert’ to release the game. Certification is a stringent set of rules, rules that all exist to make sure gamers get the experience they expect on their PlayStation 3 and PS Vita devices. It is also a way tougher process than most people realise – and getting our little seven-coloured game to match the many rules that a console game had to adhere to was pretty rough. Any game developer that has ever gone through ‘cert’ before will warn new developers of just how tough it is, and even with all the warning up front it still was tougher than we thought.

The game was stuck in certification for a while. We’d make some fixes, send it to QA, get a list of things to fix and then fix those. 2013 became 2014, and we ended up spending some of the time tweaking yet some more things. Throughout all of this, the teams at Devolver Digital and Sony have been extremely supportive of a new studio trying to find its place in the console world, and we really appreciate everything they have done for us over the past year and a half. We knew how to make good, tight arcade games – and they helped us figure out how to bring that Vlambeer-style gameplay you know us for to consoles.

LUFTRAUSERS is ready. We are really proud and excited to now bring this game to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita tomorrow, 19th March (priced £7.29/€8.99/AU$13.25, with 20% discount for PS Plus members), and we can’t wait for you to finally get your hands on the game. With over 125 LUFTRAUSERS to build – each with a unique soundtrack – there are many ways to take on the ridiculously overwhelming amount of action we’re about to throw your way.

Get ready to raus!