Hey everyone! How’s it going? This is Charlie and Mike from Infinite State Games, and we’re pretty excited we can finally announce that Rogue Aces is coming to PlayStation 4 and PS Vita on 12th April.

Rogue Aces is a procedurally-generated aerial combat arcade rogue-lite. Bear with us; it’ll start to make sense in a bit. But if you prefer explosions over reading, be sure to check out the trailer because it’s totally rad.

You begin on an aircraft carrier at the outskirts of a series of islands with three 1940s style propeller planes at your disposal. With them, you’ll be blasting your way across 100 randomly generated missions to locate and destroy the base of an invading enemy force.

Not an easy task, especially as the enemy is sending wave after wave of increasingly nasty artillery after you. To counter this, you’ll gradually build up the power of your plane, such as your fire rate, fuel capacity etc. By the end, your firepower will be nearly unstoppable – but be warned: the same can be said about your enemies.

Capturing the feel of flight

For Rogue Aces, we wanted to give players the exhilarating feeling of flying something through the sky. We approached this the scientific way – Charlie modelled the way the plane controls on an MIT flight model. The player controls the power going to the plane’s propulsion system, which means there’s scope for fantastic acrobatics, more lethal bombing runs and evasive manoeuvres.

Our game is the culmination of three years work prototyping, tweaking and perfecting from us, but of course, we also had lots of help from friends and special guests…

The voice of Jonny Bravo, Scooby and Shaggy

Providing his vocal talent is Marc Silk, the voice of Jonny Bravo, and Scooby and Shaggy. Recording with him was one of the most hilarious times of our lives.

We blasted through the lines in between him making us roll about with laughter doing every voice from our childhood. He also ended up freestyling most of the VO once we’d established that he was doing the voice for a couple of entirely unhinged cartoon characters.

He even made us a special answerphone message saying we have the finest beards in indie game development, which is incidentally true – we are prepared to use the tape as evidence.

The game’s art style and music

Video game veteran Tony Hager created the art style and graphical assets for us. He worked on Amiga classics such as Brutal Sports Football and the seminal ‘Carl Lewis Challenge’.

We went to him with a bunch of ideas of how Rogue Aces looked in our head and somehow, through some mystical mind-melding technique, he managed to completely get down on paper what we wanted.

For the music, we called upon the talents Kevvy Metal. He hails from darkest Dundee in Scotland and is the most brutal, triumphant guitar shredder we have ever encountered.

He also plays bass in the gloriously monikered metal fest ‘Fat Goth’ – but for Rogue Aces, we were lucky enough to have him write us the screaming hot riffs that a game about flying an irresponsibly overpowered plane should have.

So 12th of April is when our baby will take flight, and if you’re a PlayStation Plus member, you’ll get to enjoy 20% off as an Early Adopter Reward. We can’t wait for you guys to get hold of it and have a taste of some of the insane aerial action we’ve been enjoying during the years of development. We think, when you play it, you’ll be able to tell how much fun it was to make.