Dog Flight is an action-packed dogfighting game, inspired by retro and retro-style shoot ‘em ups like Luftrausers and Time Pilot. You play as the captain of a prototype fighter, shooting down hostile planes and deftly dodging their shots, facing overwhelming odds alone with only your skills to help you.
Fight your way through five levels and waves of enemies, and come out as the top dog!
Features
- Fast-paced dogfighting action with flashy visuals
- Challenging gameplay with nuanced combat
- 5 action-packed levels with unique enemies and graphics
- Both controller and keyboard + mouse support
Development
When coming up with ideas for our game project, we had a decent amount of freedom. We were given a list of retro games, and told to use one of them as an inspiration and base for our own game. However, while researching the list, one of the team members drew a connection between one of the games, Time Pilot, and a much newer game Luftrausers, by the Dutch indie studio Vlambeer.
Broadly similar games, both based on flying a plane and fighting enemies with full 360-degree movement, Luftrausers’ big gimmick is that movement is physics-based; the player needs to concentrate both on fighting enemies and keeping themselves flying. Pitching it to the team, we all thought the concept was interesting, and agreed to try and make something similar.
The development process of the game went fairly smoothly. As movement is a huge part of Luftrausers, that is also the part that took the most time to develop. Around the first month of programming was spent almost exclusively on getting the movement and camera to feel right – everything else came afterwards.
The biggest hurdle during the project was designing player feedback. As the game started to take shape, it became clear that a lot of features the dev team thought obvious were actually very difficult for players to figure out – things like health regeneration, player ammo count and the fact that enemies spawn in distinct waves. As it turns out, even a relatively simple game like Luftrausers has to do a lot of barely noticeable things to make the player understand what’s going on. Luckily, both by analyzing how other games do it and by playtesting the hell out of Dog Flight we were able to fix most, though not all, of our feedback issues.
Overall, we’re very happy with how the game turned out, and the things we learned while making it. We hope our players like it too!
