LUFTRAUSERS is a short game. To be precise, it takes about thirty seconds. We’re not talking in terms of hours you need to complete the campaign, although you technically could beat it within two minutes. We’re not even talking about how many hours you’ll be playing the game in total. What we’re talking about is the amount of time a single round of LUFTRAUSERS is going to take you.

When you boot the game for the first time on your PlayStation 3 or PS Vita, you’ll see the logos of Vlambeer and Devolver Digital – as you’d expect. There’ll be a short introductory cutscene, as a lone dot appears on enemy radar. A submarine rises from the water.

The structure of the game is really simple. You start out with the original LUFTRAUSER, the most powerful airplane ever built. It is launched perfectly vertical from a submarine that only submerges for the shortest of moments to allow you to establish yourself as the nightmare of the many enemies surrounding you.

A game of LUFTRAUSERS is essentially you trying to survive against increasing odds. While at first you might engage only basic fighter planes, it’ll take an average player just moments to lure out more powerful foes – fighter jets and boats. You’ll pull impressive maneuvers to dodge their fire while returning a constant spray of bullets. Only every now and then will you release the fire button to allow your airplane to repair itself. Eventually, you succumb to the crossfire in a glorious explosion.

This should be about thirty seconds after you boot up the game.

If you were good at the game, you’d be fighting the final boss in approximately sixty seconds. Of course, you just got started so you’re probably terrible at the game, although admittedly, you probably did pull some crazy acrobatics.

You start over and the game introduces missions that you can complete to unlock new LUFTRAUSER parts. While you slowly start to come to grips with the game and clear some missions, your average game time is still under fifty seconds. You might’ve seen a larger sea vessel at this point, but they’re mighty enemies that you simply cannot manage to defeat.
We don’t think a ‘run’ has to be long. We think that at the end of each run, you should feel like you know what you did wrong or what you could do better.

You start unlocking parts – engines, weapons and body parts that you can combine to create 125 different combinations of LUFTRAUSER. Do you build a slower, but more heavily armored RAUSER with a heavy weapon and a submarine engine to take those larger, new boats? Maybe you prefer speed over armor, and maybe you like to get in close for melee damage?

As you learn to survive longer, your combos rack up higher. Your scores keep increasing. You start to understand how the game works and how each LUFTRAUSER handles. If you want to be truly good at this game, there are many more challenges you need to master. From enemy aces equipped with machineguns to classified entities – there’s a lot to learn before you can call yourself worthy of a real LUFTRAUSER pilot.

From our playtests we can tell you that an average game of LUFTRAUSERS is sixty-eight seconds. In that time, people kill about seventy to a hundred enemies. We can also tell you that about 30% of players have managed to ‘complete the game’ including the final boss.

We wanted to make a game about becoming the best fighter pilot in the world. If you’re willing to rise to that challenge, you’ll be meandering your favorite RAUSER through clouds of bullets, picking off stray foes and shooting down enemies a hundred times your size. We promise you though, that will not come easy. It will take practice.

We wanted to create a game that gets to the point without nonsense. We wanted to create a game that doesn’t hold your hand, that allows you to fail and get better.

Well, that and we really like explosions and absurd amounts of screen shake.

Hey there PlayStation.Blog, it’s been a few months! Last time we spoke was before we released Super Crate Box for PlayStation Mobile – and since then we’ve been working on games on other platforms. One of those games was LUFTRAUSERS, a dogfighting game about flying and building your own LUFTRAUSER airplane.

We’ll be honest with you – the reason this game is going to hit PS3 and PS Vita is because we loved working with Sony when we made Super Crate Box. We think both platforms are great and we obviously want you to be able to play our games – but we don’t like dealing with people that treat us as some sort of commercial asset only. We want to work with people that love games as much as we love working on them.

Think of it this way: we’re a two-man studio that is investing a lot of time into making a game about shooting airplanes that is fun, explosive and makes you feel like the best pilot in the world. We want to be spending time on that, not on having nitpicky negotiations about ‘does the game fulfill random checklist item three’.

We had to deal with barely any of that red tape. Thanks the team at Devolver Digital? (the same crew that are working with Dennaton Games to bring you Hotline Miami) and the people we’ve been working with at Sony, we’ve been able to get right to what matters most: making a fun game about airplanes for people to enjoy on their PlayStation devices. So instead of worrying about that sort of thing, we’ve been working hard to balance the game so you’re always in the heat of battle, we’ve been adding more impossible missions and most importantly, we’ve been making the plane crashes more satisfying.

Working on this game we slowly realized that that is what LUFTRAUSERS is about: it’s about being the best fighter pilot in the world. It’s about barely dodging that homing missile that would’ve ended your run just short of your high score. It’s about finishing a minute-long tense battle with a huge airship. It’s a fighter jet crashing into a boat and sinking it. And most importantly, it’s about doing all of the above in the span of seconds, while pulling acrobatic moves with the best airplane in the world.

And when it’s over and the dust clears from your glorious defeat, you head back into the hangar and think – ‘what if I tried it with a laser mounted instead of a machinegun?’

We can’t wait to see which of over 125 airplane combinations will be your favorite.

It’s been a while since Super Crate Box originally debuted as a PC download and put the two of us here at Vlambeer in the worldwide spotlight for arcade games. Today, Super Crate Box is available on Mac, Steam and iOS. With the launch of Playstation Mobile, it’ll be available for PlayStation Vita and other PlayStation Certified Devices, too.

For the uninitiated, Super Crate Box is an action-arcade game in which you control a little guy tasked with collecting as many crates as possible while fending off enemies and avoiding your impending death. Every crate you pick up randomly changes your method of attack, so you’d better be ready for anything.

When Sony reached out to us a few months ago to have Super Crate Box launch with PSM, we sent a request to friends and fellow coders to help us out developing it within the limited time we had left to launch. We received some great, professional applications and a single e-mail from a fan. The fan turned out to be an avid Super Crate Box player, and an experienced programmer to boot. He made a small side-note: he would only be able to work at night, because during the day he had a job as a bus-driver. Easy choice.

The game shaped up rapidly and before we knew it, a young man in his bus-driver uniform was working at the office with us to test an early build on a PlayStation Vita. Immediately we knew: we spent ages on perfecting the iOS touch-controls, creating what we still believe are amongst the best touch controls ever – but on PS Vita, Super Crate Box feels right at home; it’s portable, it’s fast and it’s precise.

We’re really looking forward to hearing about your high scores in the comments – the iOS version has 2000+ crates as highscore. After October 3rd, we’ll see for once and for all what physical buttons are worth.

For those of you who’re about to play the game for the first time ever: our sincere apologies for the discgun.

Also, be sure to keep an eye on PlayStation.Blog for information about how to get PSM games such as Super Crate Box onto your PlayStation Vita or other PlayStation-certified device after the PSM launch.

Need more information on PlayStation Mobile? Want to know more about supported tablets and phones? Head here.