Jet Car Stunts was described as "a fun, over the top, 3D driving game, with massive jumps, mid-air hoops, floating platforms, spiral roadways, outlandish maneuvers and impossible environments." Controls are accelerometer based along with mid-air flight controls to nudge the angle of flight or adjust speed with air braking.

We loved the look of the game video, but had some questions about the game's playability from that video alone. We've since had a chance to interview Luke Ryan and Andy Coates of True Axis about their upcoming racer. They also provided this exclusive hands-on video showing their game and controls in action:

TouchArcade: We understand Jet Car Stunts is based on the True Axis Physics SDK. Can you give us a little bit of history on this game engine and the company?

Luke Ryan: The True Axis Physics SDK was a bit of an accidental development. It started back in 2002 as part of a game demo I was developing. The physics engines back then were not good enough, and I already had a few years experience involving lots of physics programming, so I made a much better one. I started getting a few requests to make it commercial. In-between doing contract work for mobile and handheld games, I did all the extra work necessary to commercialise it, which was the reason for the formation of the company, True Axis.

Since then, the physics engine scene has changed unrecognisably. I'd always kept in touch with the mobile gaming scene here in Melbourne and I started to fall back into that. I met my co-owner at True Axis, Andy Coates, while I was helping out at Firemint. In 2008, I decided to take True Axis into independent game development which has always been my dream.

Back at Firemint, Andy was motivated to get into iPhone development after working closely with James Hui. James went on to form Epicforce and released the excellent iFighter. In turn, Andy approached me and convinced me to move into iPhone development together. Andy joined me as co-owner as True Axis moved from physics engines to mobile games.

We have a few projects in the works, but Jet Car Stunts came from thinking about a good use for the physics engine, a gap in the market Andy noticed on the App Store, and many years experience developing driving games. Jet Car Stunts borrows ideas from many places, but the core of it goes back 10 years to when I was coding a rocket power-up for a sand box driving game. I learnt that fast cars, massive jumps, plus rocket power is even more fun than it sounds.

Q: In our first preview of the game, we questioned how good the controls were for the game. So, how are the controls?

Luke Ryan:: Accelerometer controls were a concern when we were deciding to make this game. I put a lot of effort into early prototyping, borrowing from many years experience working on mobile and handheld driving games. To my surprise, the controls actually worked much better than I had hoped for. The game was immediately fun to play, and has improved a lot during development. Making this game has really been a lot of fun and we've been having a lot of fun playing it too.

Q: How does the game perform on last generation devices (iPhone 3G, 2G iPod touch) vs. current generation units (iPhone 3GS, 3G iPod touch)?

Luke Ryan: Obviously the announcement video was not recorded on iPhone hardware. However due to precision driving nature, we were very keen to make the game as responsive and as smooth as possible. We currently have the game running at a perfectly smooth 30 FPS on a 1G iPod and 60 FPS on the 3GS/3G iPod. The 2G iPod can do 60 FPS most of the time, but we found that locking to 30 FPS gives smoother overall performance and is very hard to differentiate from the 3GS.

Andy Coates: A lot of research has been put into building the iPhone game shell to be as efficient as possible, plus a good understanding of the underlying OS, using our own custom sound mixer, and a lot of years experience in optimising the GPU side of things has made Jet Car Stunts run very well on the lowest denominator hardware (1G iPod). I don't think many developers really push the older hardware to the limits. We believe that if you can get the older hardware closer to the newer hardware, in terms of performance, then the end user will have a better game experience. What I mean is that you can spec the game design to have more eye candy content that will work on all devices really well.

Q: The game seems to be flat-shaded vs. texture mapped. Is that key to the game's performance?

Luke Ryan: We are really happy how the nostalgic graphics style of the game turned out. Part of the choice was for performance, but we also wanted to just focus on making a game that played really well, that was really high quality, but at a really affordable price. The 'flat shaded' style let us concentrate on what is important, that is, making a fun game.

I should point out, as any computer graphics buffs will be quick to guess, there is more going on than simple flat shading. The game uses pre-calculated lightmaps generated with a custom radiosity renderer. Radiosity can give really natural lighting and shadows. The light maps aren't as fast to render as flat shading, but they are still quite efficient.

Andy Coates: Also, to point out we are using 32bit colour and the game looks absolutely gorgeous.

Q: As far as we can see, the game is single-player only. Any plans for multiplayer or online leaderboards?

Luke Ryan: No multiiplayer, but an online leaderboard and achievement system are very important to us. It is the last task we have before we can complete the game, and we are working on that now.

I'm not sure how suited multi-play is to this style of game, but obviously it would be cool to figure something out. Unfortunately, multiplayer is also a lot of extra work and we don't want to do something tacked on. Our goal is to make the highest quality best value for money game we can. Having said that, future updates are always a possibility, you never know.

Andy Coates: We may consider a type of challenge mode for future updates but we have to see how the game is received.

Q: At certain times in the preview video the camera angle rotates about
the travelling vehicle. Are these scenes playback moments?

Luke Ryan: Shh, don't tell anybody. Much of the video was done from the games replay mode, and these camera angles where actually created purely for the promo video. I'll tell you what, I'll give [your readers] an opportunity to influence the game. Do you think we should waste a bit of extra time to put a button to change cameras during the replay? Think carefully about your answer, if you answer yes, I will blame you for any release delays.

Q: What is TrueAxis' view of the iPhone platform in general? What lies ahead for your studio?

Luke Ryan: We have lots of experience working on mobile games back to around 2002. The people I was working on projects with back then now seem all run very respected mobile game companies. Anyway, after fighting with so many devices with horrible controls and crippled operating systems, for so many years, working with the iPhone is a dream full of endless possibilities. As a platform, it feels more like console development. However, I've always been hesitant to do an iPhone project. I've been afraid of the day when the market becomes saturated. But, I was talked into it, and the shift to centralised distribution is really exciting. We are also excited about other platforms, and the move of the DS and PSP to digital distribution.

We are very excited about the possibilities for the future. We are overflowing with ideas, but you can probably expect to see some more driving titles somewhere. We also have to finish off the port of Pompom Games arcade space shooter, Space Tripper, that is long delayed, but fingers crossed, will be released not too long after Jet Car Stunts.

Andy Coates: There's a lot of excitement for independent game developers at the moment, with all those new App Stores springing up all over the place – if you have quality product then it will sell. When I lived in the UK I was involved with a mobile game studio sometime around 2002. At that time it was very hard to get phone product accepted by the Telcos, it was a closed shop… thank God those days have ended now.

I've spent a lot of time and research building an optimal graphics engine on the iPhone. It's really a nice piece of hardware to program for but things have to be done the correct way to get good performance, if you don't then you will end up with a jerky pile of rubbish.

The plan after Jet Car Stunts comes out is to get Space Tripper finished off, then port everything to every other digital distribution channel. Once that is all out of the way we can start working on newer content.

28 hand drawn levels paired with great music and a clever method of storytelling puts Spider pretty high on my list of personal favorites, and judging by the forum response, I'm not alone. If you haven't heard of the game yet, check out our review and watch this trailer that was recently put together by the developers:

After playing through Spider, we wanted to know more about the people behind it and what went into a game that is currently sitting at 146 5-star ratings on iTunes. We tracked down Randy Smith and David Kalina, the two people behind Tiger Style to ask them a few questions about their past, the development of Spider, and what's in store for the future.

TouchArcade / Eli Hodapp: Can you tell us more about your backgrounds in video game development and how your development team was assembled?

Randy Smith: My first project in professional game development was as a designer on Thief: The Dark Project back in 1997.  This game was made at a legendary, now-defunct, design boutique called Looking Glass Studios, at which I was very lucky to kick off my career.  Since then, among other things, I have been the Project Director of Thief: Deadly Shadows, and a Creative Director at Electronic Arts Los Angeles working on a video game collaboration with Steven Spielberg.  I also have the good fortune to write a monthly column in the UK’s finest gaming magazine, Edge, and I am a frequent speaker at the Game Developer’s Conference, the Montreal International Game Summit, and similar conferences.

When the time came to start a new studio, I took a ground-up approach, meaning that although I had a basic idea of the culture and organization I wanted it to become, I also wanted to adapt that vision depending on who got involved, essentially leaving space for the team itself to drive the company’s identity and direction.  

I sent feelers out to a group of folks that had been among my favorite creative collaborators: former co-workers, college classmates, old friends that I’d worked with on independent projects, and so forth, all people whose talents and vision I deeply respected and who I thought would work well together.  When David signed on and immediately began making strong, consistent contributions, I quickly decided he had as much stake in the company’s success as I did and invited him to co-own the company with me.

Tiger Design from top left to bottom right: Jon Whitmore, Scott Barber, Jen Cha, Jef Drawbaugh, Randy Smith, Theron Jacobs, Amanda Williams, David Kalina, Julia Tabor, Brennan Carr, Ethan Greene, and Rick Tossavainen.

David Kalina: 
I spent most of the last decade as an AI programmer for AAA console games.  I worked on the original Splinter Cell at Ubi Soft Montreal, then moved down to Austin, where I worked on the AI for Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows, which is where Randy and I first worked together.  I spent the intervening 3.5 years working on the Criminal project at Midway before it was canceled. 

Randy asked me if I wanted to do something crazy and risky and start an iPhone company back in November.  At the time, it seemed like the perfect antidote to years and years of working for a large game developer on a game that nobody ever played.

TouchArcade: What made you decide on develop for the iPhone? Any plans to port it to other platforms?

DK: We decided to be iPhone developers on Day 1. The iPhone is a fascinating device to design for, as it has so many potential inputs to play with: the touch-screen, the accelerometer, the camera, the GPS functionality. On top of all that, it's nearly ubiquitous, many of our friends carry one around all the time, and we were excited to make games that so many of our friends and family would have access to.

Also, the barrier to entry is incredibly low: you need a Mac and a $99 developer account to get started. Add that to some of the early Gold Rush stories about guys like the Trism and iShoot developers getting rich, and we thought we could definitely be successful in the iPhone space.

RS: Our hope is that we’ll find a comfortable home in the iPhone market, in terms of a receptive audience and enough income to pay the bills. We could theoretically port our games, but that’s not where our passion lies. We’d rather be out there making something new.

TouchArcade: How did you decide on the Spider mechanic for your first game? You mentioned it took 8 months to develop the game?

RS: We discussed a large number of possible concepts to develop before we settled on Spider, but once we had a Spider prototype running, it was so promising that we knew we didn’t need to try exploring any further.  The prototype demonstrated the basic controls and web building mechanics, and the overall game structure (linear sequence of levels, minimum insect requirement to progress, etc.) followed pretty quickly.  The project took another 6 or more months after that to design and build all of the content, especially the levels.  In the meantime, David kept augmenting and refining the functionality of Spider, making constant improvements and adding large features like the Facebook Connect.

The levels took so long to develop because each of them is the output of painstaking research and photographic reference collection, cut apart and pieced back together into a layout that would be visually pleasing, functional for web building gameplay, appropriate to the story and setting, and compatible with our cross-sectional view.  Often this was an iterative process, meaning a given level would be designed and redesigned multiple times until we got it right.  Converting these designs into game-ready art involved handing them off to our art team of about 4 artists, who, using traditional art materials, Wacom tablets, and Photoshop, recreated them in Spider’s signature style of digital illustration.

DK: The 8 month development all took place after we decided on Spider as the concept.  Randy was moving cross-country back in December, which worked out fairly well as I used that time to start building the technology and prototyping the basic concept.  We were originally hoping (rather optimistically) to finish our first game before GDC in March, but we were quite off on our initial estimates.

The original concept called for an accelerometer-based spider movement, but our first play test (back in February) indicated that it was the wrong approach.  We iterated on the touch-to-walk movement mechanics many times, up until the final month of the project, before settling on the current system.  Swipe-to-jump, on the other hand, really only had one major revision in its lifespan.  The original version was just a little bit too hard to control because it attempted to map directly to the speed of the player's finger, so in other words you could jump at large, analog range of velocities.  We instead switched to a version where your swipe is mapped to either a slow jump or a fast jump.  After this, our play testers became much more comfortable with the controls, and we knew we were onto a good thing.

TouchArcade:



 Was there ever a point where you felt you were spending way too much time developing the game?

DK: It was originally our intent to spend 4 months on this project, not 8, so it certainly got to a point where we were nervous about burning for too long on this particular project.  Randy and I are both perfectionists, to some degree.  Because of this, it was easy for us to constantly find new things that needed improving on.

We talked sometimes about trying to "take the bottom out" when polishing the game.  In other words, we would identify the part(s) of the game that were most offensive / ugliest / least playable, and then work to make that part better or remove it entirely.  The difficulty with this approach is that every time you take something crappy and make it better, something new stands out as being crappy and in need of fixing.

We were committed to making a quality app from the beginning, and I am proud that we stuck to our guns and didn't compromise.  Our strategy was to stand out in the market by making something better than 99% of the App Store.  It's incredibly risky and challenging to set out to do that, but if we didn't believe we were capable of accomplishing that goal, we probably wouldn't have started the business in the first place.  Even still, we now have to sell a very significant number of copies to make our business sustainable, so it's not yet clear if the strategy has paid off.

RS: I agree wholeheartedly with David.  My ambition has always been to make innovative, high quality software for the iPhone, because it is a platform that I believe in having a strong potential to make a positive impact on gaming and interactive art.   Market forces are a reality that you always have to respect, but that doesn’t mean you have to conform to them completely, and if we felt like our only option for being iPhone developers was to release quick, cheap, low quality games, then we would probably decide to seek out a more suitable home for our creative efforts.  Our hope was that there was a niche left open in the app store market for high quality, original works, and our success so far seems to indicate that was the case.  Spider has really picked up a ton of momentum largely with word of mouth, seemingly based on it being a high quality offering.  The question for us now is whether we will reach enough people for that to translate into sustainable income, but so far we are feeling pleased with the response.   Hopefully quick, cheap games can coexist alongside longer, less cheap games.

TouchArcade: Was staying under the radar intentional with this game's release?

DK: Definitely not!  Randy and I are game developers first and foremost, so even though we talked throughout development about strategies for revealing the game to the public before release, ultimately we were consumed with finishing the game before doing any of our promotional work.  We were accepted by Apple far more quickly than we expected, so when the game was released into the App Store, we were mostly unprepared.  Our trailer video and websites were in development, but not yet finished.

It has been fascinating to watch the game spread, though, because it does have an almost purely viral activity right now.  There were maybe a couple hundred people in the world (friends and family) who knew of the game before we shipped, so everything that has happened so far — cracking the Top 100 Paid Apps in the US, for example — was done entirely through word of mouth.

RS: I’m not a big lover of hype.  If our games are worthy of superlative descriptions, then it is the fans who have the right to bestow those descriptions, which they can’t do unless they’ve played the game.  So if anything, I think it makes sense to show off a little of what we’re doing ahead of time, shop it around, and see how people respond, but not to try to convince them with words that we’re the best or awesomest – their evaluations have to wait until the game is released.

Given all that, we still had envisioned a promotional effort ahead of time where we make early contact with a select few sites, develop our trailer and have it ready to go, and have a website where people can see the game and learn more about it, and the usual things.  But I don’t mind how things worked out; it’s nice to grab people’s attention by coming out of nowhere with a solid product as opposed to trying to convince them in advance that they should pay attention to you.

TouchArcade: Was there anything you wanted to do in Spider that wasn't possible due to time limitations, hardware limitations, etc? What would like to implement in the future through updates?

RS: Compared to every other project I’ve worked on, I have very few regrets with how Spider turned out, and that’s because we gave ourselves the liberty to keep working on it until we felt great about it, which is very rare in the world of AAA console development.  There are plenty of little ideas and improvements we would have liked to try, and there are edges we would have liked to smooth and polish even further, but I’m very comfortable saying we got to everything and more that was actually important to the game’s quality.

That said, there are parts of the manor and Bryce family secrets that weren’t in version 1.0, so our intent in the coming months is to release a “Director’s Cut” of the story featuring new levels that cast more light on the story.  I’m particularly excited that our fans familiar with Spider 1.0 will see how the new levels slot right into the current version of the game.  Sorta like we planned it in advance.

TouchArcade: One of the thing that really sticks out for me in Spider is how remarkably clever the story of the game is delivered. 


In the original concept of the game, did it always revolve around a spider?

RS:
 Developing solid mechanics that the player can use to drive their own experience is a prerequisite to the kind of games we want to build, so the spider and the web building came first.  Once you have that, I don’t think it’s hard to add narrative to any experience, and it was a fun process to understand and depict a human story from the perspective of a spider.  The method of telling a story by exploring an environment is a staple in the types of games David and I have worked on or loosely been associated with – Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock, Bioshock, etc..

The story was always meant to draw interested users in very subtly.  Harvey Smith, the Project Director of Deus Ex: Invisible War and a brilliant game designer who is a friend and colleague of David’s and mine, described the difference as a “push” versus a “pull” story.  When games interrupt your experience with cut scenes or books you might not want to read, they are being pushy.  When players notice a story thread that draws their interest, they can pull on it and get more story.  We built a game where the story doesn’t have to command your experience, so there was never a time when we thought it should be forced upon players.

This is very compatible with the fantasy of being a spider, because what does a spider care about human concerns?  We were drawn to these visions of a spider building webs off of objects that would have emotional significance to a human, but for a spider they are just tools for catching bugs.  The next human who comes across Bryce Manor after our hero has left will need to brush aside the cobwebs to examine the history of the Bryce family.  We wanted you to play the role of the spider who left those cobwebs.

TouchArcade: How much did the art style in Spider change from the original concepts to the game we're playing now?

RS: The original concept document depicted Spider as a photoreal game.  If you look on Flickr, you’ll see that photographers have an obsession with shooting the insect world with macro lenses that magnify small details and have a very tight focal plane, and we thought that look would help capture the feeling of being a tiny creature in a huge world, where for example the kitchen sink looks like a blurry mountain in the distance.  Eben Cook, a hugely talented and versatile artist I worked with at Electronic Arts, pitched in for a couple weeks to help us through this phase.  Eben produced an amazing proof of concept, and it gave the game an almost sterile, hyperreal look and made the world seem beautiful and glossy.

We were stoked by this direction, but we were worried about the art pipeline, which would require a lot of photography and image manipulation that seemed very time consuming and which we weren’t sure how best to achieve.  A particular worry was that the process was not very flexible with respect to gameplay design.   If we photograph a chair, and play test suggests that the chair needs to be shot from a different angle to be good for gameplay, we better hope we still have access to that same chair.

Also by this time, the Spider story was starting to emerge, and it was inspired in part by the works of Edward Gorey, whose creepy, crosshatched illustration style I’d always felt would make a fantastic art direction for a game, especially one set in an old mansion.  Once again, Eben led the way, providing a proof of concept for this very different direction for the game’s art.  We needed to add a better sense of depth than Gorey’s deliberately flat art, so we maintained the sense of a tight focal plane.  As I used to say, “the game is seen through a camera which is located in an illustrated world,” so therefore the backgrounds are a little bit blurry.  This direction for the art style rapidly grew on us, especially as we envisioned all of the character and atmosphere it could convey.

Soon after, Eben moved on to other pursuits, but his efforts had established the right direction, and the art team and I worked together to refine it, making it a little less sketchy, adding more richness and depth, and arriving at a sweet spot between traditional illustration and digital manipulation that we all really loved.

TouchArcade: When in the development process did you select the soundtrack and do you have any plans to release it?

DK: We started working with our musicians (Scott Barber and Jef Drawbaugh) back in the second month of the project.  Randy established a vision early on by pulling some sample tracks that had an organic electronica vibe to them, which felt appropriate to being a spider by communicating the sense of “meticulous work,” as one of the team members put it.  Randy provided some basic guidance to the musicians, but we mostly let them develop their songs independently, then we came together at the end of a song's production to iterate and get the tracks feeling just right.  Randy wrote one song for the game late in the project and then we took a couple of passes at mapping the final music onto the final levels.

 We fully intend to make the soundtrack available through our website in the near future.

TouchArcade: What do you have planned for the future of Tiger Style?

DK:
 For now, it's full time promotional work on Spider for a month or two, including an update and a lite version.  After that, we intend to start work on Game 2.  It is really important for us as a developer to demonstrate our creative range, so we are going to work on something other than Spider for a little while.  If Spider's popularity stays strong, it will be hard for us to not eventually want to revisit the property and build on its success, but we have no concrete plans yet.

Both Randy Smith (Randy Smith) and David Kalina (David Tiger) have been active participants in TouchArcade's forums.

App Store Link: Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, $2.99

In fact, Carmack said that they were hoping to release a new id title to the iPhone every 2-3 months for the next year. These titles will include a mix of their classic PC games such as Doom and Quake as well as newer mobile games including Wolfenstein RPG.

The complete list of titles and add-ons mentioned in the interview are listed here:

• Doom Resurrection – Bluetooth Cooperative Multiplayer coming
• Wi-Fi Multiplayer is currently working in Doom Classic (not yet released)
• Doom Classic closing in on being ready for initial release
• Plans for 3.0 support in Doom Classic with Bluetooth Multiplayer and downloadable content including Doom 2, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom, Master Levels
• Considering competitive internet multiplayer in later update to Doom Classic
• Planning Quake, Quake 2 for the iPhone and maybe all the way up to Quake Arena
• Plans to do a Rage themed from-scratch iPhone title
• Wolfenstein RPG ready to go but being held by EA due to concern about confusion with Wolfenstein Classic
• Doom 2 RPG is in works for mobile and that will be ported to iPhone too
• Very early talks about a modernized Doom ("Doom++") release with new levels and story

We had a sneak peek at the cooperative multiplayer of Doom Resurrection at WWDC which allowed two Bluetooth connected players to play simultaneously — each player with their own reticule on the other's screen.

The currently unavailable Wolfenstein RPG title was accidentally released in Japan for a brief period of time, and one site was able to get video of it before it was pulled. Carmack hopes that the game will be released soon, but the decision seems to be with EA.

Overall, Carmack is very excited about the iPhone, and clearly it shows given id's aggressive plans to launch a massive number of titles over the next year for the platform. Carmack said that while they'd had fun with traditional mobile games, he's "had a lot more fun on the iPhone".

We've included the full transcript after the jump and is certainly worth a read if you have any interest in these upcoming games.

Interview Transcript

Eli / TouchArcade: What kind of future plans do you guys have for the Doom series? Tom showed us a really cool bluetooth Doom Resurrection coop mode at WWDC, are you going to be doing anything like that in the future with downloadable content (DLC) or how is that all going to work?

Tom Mustaine: Yeah, we've got a early functional demo that does cooperative play through peer to peer bluetooth that you guys got a peek at. The hope is that the game does well enough to support patching that in. We're likely going to finish that up anyway and put it in down the road. We didn't honestly expect 3.0 to launch so quickly.

John Carmack: Haha, that's actually throwing some of my plans with Doom Classic in to little bit of an uproar too. I got it working with WiFi multiplayer right now, but I have no idea about adoption rates right now on 3.0 and if we 3.0 only, do we launch at 2.1? I'm still a little confused what we want to do on that.

I do think the right way to do iPhone titles is to launch solid then add features through the upgrades because the upgrades process is painless. You go out, fix whatever problems you had in there and add some extra sweetener features in that. For the multiplayer, that really is a 3.0 dependent thing. I don't even know how it's going to work yet as far as do you release apps with different versions for 2.0 and 3.0? Do we only release 3.0 when we don't want to support 2.0 people anymore? If they try to upgrade from there does it fail? I don't even have the answers to all these things yet, we're still kind of figuring this all out. I do hope the app is successful enough to do in-app downloadable content as another 3.0 feature so we can have additional levels going in there as well as the multiplayer side of things.

Tom: That applies to Doom Resurrection, Doom Classic, and everything else.

John: Yeah, and Doom Classic again I just got the multiplayer working on Friday and it's closing in on me finishing everything I want for the initial release of that. It may have changed with the 3.0 schedule, but my initial thought was Doom Classic goes out, it has WiFi multiplayer on the initial launch then we have a later version that has 3.0 support that has Bluetooth and downloadable content so people can get Doom 2, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom, Master Levels, all those things on there.

Then a later release where we'll consider competitive internet multiplayer on WiFi. That's kind of a long-term plan on there but I've also briefly talked with Tom about the possibility of having Escalation take the free-roaming Doom and building a much better new game from there without having to necessarily stay true to original in terms of breaking people's nostalgia factor which I'm pretty excited about. Doom Classic really is cool, it is a lot of fun to play and not only do I think it will be very successful, but games based on that generation of technology and doing new things with them on the iPhone.

Eli: If Doom Classic does well, do you see yourself making a Quake Classic as well?

John: Absolutely. I'm planning on rolling through Quake, Quake 2, and with a little bit of improvement in some of the system software from Apple (They've got a few things that are hamstringing us with touch processing and the overhead of not being able to do static data specifications on GL) I think we can manage all the way up to Quake Arena where we probably wind up taking all the Quake Live updated stuff in to there.

In any case, the 3GS is a no brainer on there, there's no worries at all on doing that at a great level of performance on there. In additional to those we've got plans to do plans to do a Rage themed from-scratch iPhone title, and our traditional mobile titles we're bringing over like Wolfenstein RPG that Firemint did kind of an iPhone up-port for that.

Wolfenstein RPG for iPhone

EA is kind of sitting on right now until they feel Wolfenstein 3D Classic has fallen off their radar. They were really kind of shocked, taken aback, and worried when I did the Wolfenstein 3D Classic stuff because they thought that people would be confused and not getting the right products and everything.

We're worried a little bit about the same thing with Doom Resurrection and Doom Classic, but it may not be an issue. The id mobile team is also internally working on the Doom 2 RPG for Java phones which will also be brought over to the iPhone as well. If people turn out to like those kind of games we also have some really great early stuff with the Orcs and Elves titles that were very successful on traditional phones that we'd like to bring over to the iPhone. I'd like to have an iPhone release every 2-3 months for the next year.

Arn / TouchArcade: Going back to a point you mentioned, you mentioned maybe getting Escalation Studios going back to work on the original Doom stuff. Would that be another crafted experience like Doom Resurrection?

John: That's based more on a couple offhand comments between us. One of the comments that I had made as I was doing Doom Classic is I have to walk a fine line I've got all these things that I'd like to do to make the game better. As I made a few changes in Wolfenstein 3D you lose the nostalgia value if you change things up too much, or at least people complain about it. I've got pages of notes of things I could do to make the game better but some of those would end up ticking off different people.

So I like the idea that Doom Classic stays faithful to the original with OpenGL rendered graphics with filtering and a good framerate as well as slightly better sound quality and a number of these things… but it's still essentially the same game with a brand new finely crafted control system on it.

What would be cool is then go ahead and take all the things I'd like to do with it. (And my internal name for this is Doom++.) Where you take all of the art assets and modernize the gameplay in some of the ways we've learned to make better games since then. Make brand new levels, carry a story through it, and do some modern things. We haven't committed to any of this, but Tom would be the perfect guy to run through all this stuff since he has experience all the way back to the original Doom levels.

Tom: We talked about it briefly, and you can do some pretty amazing stuff on this platform with that tech. As well as obviously taking all the principles of all the multiplayer shooters that have come out since Doom invented it back in the day and apply it to the multiplayer and apply a lot of it to the single player. You can build a real interesting experience with this kind of engine and build it relatively quickly too. From the technology standpoint from Doom Resurrection, we'll be moving that forward down the line as well.

Eli: So Wolfeinstein RPG is ready to roll and EA is just sitting on it?

John: It's in the can, evidently there was some glitch where people were able to get it. It's based on the Java game that the id mobile team did, and Firemint did a really good job on making it up to iPhone quality levels. We provided a bunch more up-res'd art and sound assets but they did some good work on trying out different user interfaces to figure out how to take something that was designed for a clamshell phone and playing it on the iPhone.

That's got a different take on things where it's much more story progression driven and not real time twitch action which should certainly appeal to a chunk of the iPhone market that's not really hardcore action gamers. EA's worry was we'd have to convince people to buy two Wolfenstein titles because Wolfenstein 3D Classic went out and it did well, but EA is concerned of people confusing the titles. I have no idea when they plan on releasing it. I'm disappointed that it's not out by now. I never liked having completed games that people will have a lot of fun with sitting in the can.

Arn: It sounds like there is a lot coming from id, that's great.

John: I'm very excited about the platform. We've had fun with the traditional mobile stuff and I felt we did some really great games on the mobile platform that took advantage of what we can do there but I've had a lot more fun on the iPhone than on the Java stuff.

Clearly, one of the most talked about aspect of the game is the control system that has been called an "on rails" experience. Carmack and Mustaine both object to that characterization, however, and feel that by removing the free-roam aspect, it becomes far more accessible and better experience overall.

One of the things I like to say is if you compare this to one of our traditional FPS games like Wolfenstein 3D Classic to a lesser extent and even more with Doom Classic… but those games can look really good when you've got somebody who knows what they're doing playing around with it, somebody who is comfortable with the controls. But, the first pick up response on it generally is not that great even from a FPS person because it's a control set people aren't familiar with.
….
And with Doom Resurrection because you do trade off some freedom, you don't have the ability to roam everywhere, but the game looks good all the time. …. And it does have that sort of skill based progression just like you would have with a traditional FPS game but it just has a generally more sort of positive feedback on there without the downside of making people feel like they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing.

Yeah I do take some pride in that traditionally as like id invented the FPS genre on the other platforms, I think we will be a bit of a trailblazer in control methods etcetera on the iPhone as well. It's a platform that I care quite a bit about and we are making an effort across all the products to make sure that they do all come out well. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I do expect this to be imitated.

In response to the question of App Store pricing, Carmack stressed that that was a very important part of the equation for the future of big-title games in the App Store. He believes that for the market to be able to sustain big AAA titles in the future, the App Store market is going to have to be able to support higher priced titles of at least $9.99.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

A full transcript of the interview is included after the jump. We have more information on Doom Classic, Wolfenstein RPG and id's future iPhone plans which we will report in a separate article.

App Store Link: Doom Resurrection, $9.99

Gameplay Experience

Tom Mustaine: What did you guys think when you got your hands on it?

Arn / TouchArcade: I liked it a lot. The best thing was it felt like Doom. Of course, there are a lot of people concerned with the scripted "on rails" aspect of it.

John Carmack: We tried to avoid having it characterized like that, there is a stigma associated with that. (Tom: Kind of an old school stigma.) We like to talk about it as kind of a "crafted experience."

One of the things I like to say is if you compare this to one of our traditional FPS games like Wolfenstein 3D Classic to a lesser extent and even more with Doom Classic — which obviously not many people have seen yet since it's not released — but those games can look really good when you've got somebody who knows what they're doing playing around with it, somebody who is comfortable with the controls. But, the first pick up response on it generally is not that great even from a FPS person because it's a control set people aren't familiar with, and just with any FPS, if you can't do the controls you generally tend to look stupid and it's not the most rewarding … when you're bumbling around not doing what you want it to do.

And with Doom Resurrection because you do trade off some freedom, you don't have the ability to roam everywhere, but the game looks good all the time. You may wind up dying if you can't shoot the monsters effectively but you don't necessarily look like a fool when you're doing it, and the game is pretty cool to look at even when you're in the process of failing. And it does have that sort of skill based progression just like you would have with a traditional FPS game but it just has a generally more sort of positive feedback on there without the downside of making people feel like they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing.

That's a problem that we have all the time in high-level FPS game design. You can spend so much time building really awesome things that happen in the world, but the player is almost never cooperative, you know? They're almost never looking where you want them to unless you actually yank the control away from them which puts you again outside this free-roaming motion. The player will generally be looking off to the side or not even in the right place or they walk away when something cool is happening. So what we get for trading away some of the freedom on this is the controls make sure whatever cool stuff we put in everybody really gets to see.

Gameplay Controls

Arn: I understand that you hadn't initially gone with this design decision. Can you talk about how you came to this control system?

Tom: Yeah, early on when we all sat down initially and discussed this game, it was kind of a foregone conclusion that the thing you do is tap on the screen to shoot the monsters. That's what we implemented for the majority of the design (about half way through the development) before we actually took a stab at it to make a change. But honestly, up until the half way point, the game just wasn't really fun at all. It just wasn't resonating.

You play the game and you tap on the monsters with your finger and you move through the world and you'd be covering the monster with your finger and you didn't have the kind of compulsion you could expect, you know, that aiming mechanic you really need. So about half way through both id and us were really looking at this thing saying "It's not shaping up" and we were actually considering canceling it at one point.

But we got to a point where we made a change and moved over to the kind of accelerometer/aiming mechanic and what that did is literally overnight made the game go from being kind-of-not-fun to actually a really engaging experience and it finally captured what we wanted out of the thing from day one which was a distilled shooter experience. It captures all the elements you'd expect out of Doom and all the visceral combat and feedback and everything but it has that compulsion of micro-seconds of where I've got to aim at this guy, and I can't hit this one in the head quick enough, I've got to use more bullets on this guy and that really turned it from a game that was kind of half-and-half to a game that actually was hard to put down and that was a big part of it.

This is the first time that both Escalation and id have built a game like this, this is the first time we've built something outside of the standard traditional shooter realm that we know so there was definitely a bit of experimentation and iteration and what we ended up with is something we're all very proud of.

John: It is always interesting when you're presented with new user input capabilities and figuring out what the right thing to do there is. That's an exciting part but it's a risky part because we did go into this whole project saying we're not positive this is going to work and I was very careful to not pre-announce this project, not get anyone excited ahead of time because we were prepared to just kill it if it wasn't actually going to be a lot of fun. And it is interesting when you talk about dynamics. We used to talk about how we might do FPS dynamics, different ways of doing things here, and you can't just be doing them analytically. You can't just be staring up in the space and say "Well I think the right way to deal with a touch screen and accelerometer is like this." We did a bunch of that on this project, on Wolfenstein Classic and I've got other experiments on Doom Classic. In a lot of ways you have to try a whole bunch of things. In the classic games on there I've tried three or four other methods that aren't actually in the shipping game and other stuff I've tried since on Doom …. and you really have to throw a lot of things at the wall and see what winds up sticking.

Tom: We were actually really surprised. You guys saw my screen at WWDC. I've played almost every single other kind of what you'd call "shooter game" on the platform and nobody settled on this kind of aiming and shooting mechanic. I was actually pretty surprised, I think we're going to be setting a path for people. We put a good deal of time and money into this to ensure that it's a fun game and I think that's going to be beneficial to other people as they're building games in this kind of genre going forward so it was definitely an interesting experience.

John: Yeah I do take some pride in that traditionally as like id invented the FPS genre on the other platforms, I think we will be a bit of a trailblazer in control methods etcetera on the iPhone as well. It's a platform that I care quite a bit about and we are making an effort across all the products to make sure that they do all come out well. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I do expect this to be imitated.

Technical Capabilities of iPhone

Arn: Did you find the control system to be the major issue in creating the game? From a technical perspective can you talk about moving the Doom 3 assets over from a difficulty standpoint?

John: Things came over visually pretty quickly. We had it looking good early on and we knew this was going to be a good hook because even the early versions that we didn't think were that much fun to play, we had some really strong reactions. Somebody was playing on the iPhone and somebody glances over their shoulder. An exact quote from one of the people was "Holy cow!" as this is not what they were expecting to see on the phone. But, that wasn't going to be enough to have us release the product with it. We had to get some other stuff up there.

There are some interesting things where it turns out [the iPhone] is more gated on the CPU than the GPU right now and we could have structured some things differently and made a little bit more push on there and even this doesn't max out the traditional iPhones. There are different ways we could do things to squeeze more performance out of there and certainly when you look towards the 3GS there's lots of opportunity there for doing different things. But from a technical standpoint, it all went reasonably smooth. You're never done, you can always spend more time and effort to make things more optimized or try out different techniques on there. But we learned a few things through this process, I learned a bunch on Wolfenstein Classic and Doom Classic and carried those things over. And we've got more stuff for all of these projects going forward, which there is going to be a lot.

Tom: That said too, there's also definitely a bit of a performance difference between the original devices versus the 2nd generation iPod touch which is the fastest device before the 3GS. So there's quite a bit of smoke and mirrors going on. Technically we achieved exactly what we set out on early on visually, and there are actually some visibility solutions in there that were inspired by what John and his team had done in Rage. So there's some pretty cool stuff going on under the hood to make Resurrection look as good as it does, but that does create some limitations because we had to make sure to target the devices that are out there and we didn't know anything about the 3GS until everybody else did about three weeks ago. We made some pretty specific decisions early on and got everything up and running really quickly, and it shifted to making sure it was fun.

Pricing and the App Store Market

Arn: You guys were at an advantage being able to use the Doom 3 assets developed previously, do you guys have any thoughts on the App Store pricing models in general. The App Store is becoming a very competitive and cheap market for a lot of things.

John: That really is a significant issue. Doom Resurrection is launching at $9.99. We'll see how it does there or if it's completely shunned. It is a significant deal for the platform even though the numbers are good for how many units are out there and how many units people are moving on different things. We've done quite well with Wolfenstein 3D Classic on there and certainly expect to do even better on Doom Classic. From a hardware standpoint, the iPhone should be a better gaming platform than what you've got on the DS and PSP. You've got some software things in the way that keep you from achieving all that you could with that but those are things that we have reasonable hopes that Apple will be evolving to address.

Right now you really couldn't afford a full-fledged, "do the best possible job" development on here. Doom Resurrection was a pretty expensive project to develop. I can't say for sure how it ranks relative to anything else but the big titles on the iPhone so far have been ports and the novel titles have been generally small projects.

This is definitely going to be up there, if not the most expensive to develop it's going to be in the top five probably. A team of professional developers who otherwise would be working on high end console titles are working on the iPhone here. And as I said, this is far from really maxing out what we can do on there. Especially now that we've seen one of the really good signs is that people buying Myst shows us that it's possible to go ahead and have hundreds of megs of downloads which encourages us to do things like mega-texturing on future things and all that kind of stuff.

Still, if you look at a DS or PSP game, if it's intended to be a AAA one, they spend millions of dollars developing those. If you want to look at the latest Zelda or something going on the DS those are very very expensive projects to develop. The iPhone can certainly do anything that you're doing on there and make a better game with it. If the average price of a successful app has to be $1.99 it's never going to happen. We hope that the market can stratify a little bit. Even if it stays at $9.99, the margins are better than other consoles and there are some other savings in there. If [iPhone] games could have a reasonable shelf life at $9.99, you will start seeing multi-million dollar development budgets as the market continues to grow. But if it turns out the only way you end up being successful on the iPhone is games that cost a couple dollars, you're never going to achieve that parity with the other handhelds.

iPhone gamers may know him from his color-matching game Dapple [$0.99], though he also gained some notoriety from a blog post he made back in March in which he detailed the (lack of) sales of his first iPhone title. The blog post received wide circulation after being posted to Slashdot.

After 6 months of development, his iPhone game had sold a disappointing 131 copies worldwide during the first 24 days on the market–very short of the numbers he would need to sustain a long term business. The reaction was massive and varied. Goss received both positive and strongly negative feedback about his results. He says, however, that his plan had always been to be open about his sales numbers good or bad. Back in 2008, when he decide to start his own gaming company, he did his research about the indie gaming scene and found a significant reporting bias. In that, success stories are much more likely to be told than the many failures.

Goss has reflected about the reasons for his lack of success in his blog, and also told us that he may have invested too much time into the 1.0 release. Coming from a console background, he had a strong desire for the 1.0 version to be feature complete and rock solid. He remains proud of the fact that he has not had a single crash report since the game's release. In today's iPhone market, however, such a thorough development cycle may not be realistic for small time developers. In the recent past, we've seen numerous examples of less ambitious 1.0 titles that have evolved over time after gaining some initial traction.

Goss isn't giving up, though. He remains optimistic about his future plans and is continuing to market and work on Dapple. His long term goal is to build his own brand around quality games and is working on additional titles. He's also helped organize AppTreasures.com, a cross promotional effort between multiple independent iPhone developers, to help boost sales of Dapple. Dapple has just seen a 1.2 version update that adds global high scores and a number of other user interface tweaks and fixes. Goss has even temporarily dropped the price of his game to $0.99 for the next week.

Owen Goss has been a regular in our forums with as OTrain13 and some early forum reactions to the game were posted in the original Dapple release thread from February. You can give the game a try yourself with the free Lite version.

App Store Link: Dapple, $0.99, Dapple Lite, Free

In the piece, Hawkins discusses the unique, social nature of mobile gaming today and echoes his earlier sentiments that the iPhone is a "breakthrough platform" that is leading the new wave of connected mobile devices that are being heavily embraced by today's "omni consumers," a new sort of user interested in interacting with digital media of many forms and on many different levels.

Hawkins expresses great satisfaction with the performance of his studio's games on the iPhone platform (four of the studio's games have hit #1 in the App Store) and calls Digital Chocolate "the #1 game company on the iPhone," based on 20 million downloads of their games, or 2% of all App Store downloads.

According to Hawkins, Sony and Nintendo should be very concerned by the iPhone's success and the degree to which today's omni consumers are embracing this new type of device.

They're using all kinds of platforms, many of them are brand new. And they've got a very different expectation [from gamers 10 years ago]. They're really looking more for social value than for escapism. They want to find new ways to check in and be in contact with people than just checking out and doing something by themselves.

Trip Hawkins left Apple in 1982 to form Electronic Arts. He was the man behind 3DO and formed mobile development studio Digital Chocolate in 2003.

Adam provides some background on the game, details the game's features and controls, and provides some new screenshots in this exclusive interview.

Touch KO is a Fight Night inspired boxing game that was announced at GDC this year. It will be published by Chillingo.

TouchArcade: Tell us a little about yourselves. What is your history?

Adam: Matt (pictured in black shirt) and I both work full-time for Flashbang Studios in Tempe, Arizona. We have done a couple of iPhone games (iSplume, Rebolt, Raptor Copter), but our focus is primarily on web games for our portal, blurst.com. These web games include Off-Road Velociraptor Safari and Minotaur China Shop, among others (we do a new game every 8 weeks).

Prior to Flashbang, I had been working in the games industry on console products for several years. I worked as a technical artist for THQ, doing art and programming for a real-time muscle deformation system on an action sports title, and worked on Baja: Edge of Control for 2XL Games. Matt worked on an astrophysics simulation using data from the Hubble Space Telescope before he joined Flashbang.

Q: When and how did you start Touch KO?

Adam: I started Touch KO at a game jam right after the Unity conference in October last year. Unity (our middleware) had just added iPhone support, so I wanted to try it out. I wanted to do something with realistic character animation, and felt like a boxing game would be a good bet, given my previous experience.

By the end of the weekend in Copenhagen I had a boxer with a control system and an animation system that let me control different parts of the body using the touch-screen and accelerometer. The game stayed on ice a couple months my wife and I got caught up in the holiday rush.

In January I picked the game back up in my free time to see how far I could take it. I added some motion capture animation, textures, an environment, and it was shaping up to be a great-looking game so I wanted to take it all the way to completion. My brother, Matt, jumped on to help with some additional programming (like AI) since he had a lot of fun working on our last iPhone game, Rebolt.

Q: What was the inspiration behind the game? Any particular titles?

Adam: We've drawn a lot of inspiration from Fight Night in particular — it really captures the strategic aspects of boxing. We've also tried to incorporate some of the faster arcade-style action of games like Punch-Out and some of the boxing games on the phone.

We've found, though, that it's no longer enough to just have a fun game. With all of the apps out there, it's important how you promote your games to make sure players can find them. So we got in touch with the guys at Chillingo through a friend. They've had some success recently promoting titles for the iPhone and they've been great people, so it was a good match.

Q: How far does the realism run? Does a wounded eye obscure the game screen, for instance? Any other more subtle touches?

Adam: Actually that is one of the things we are testing!

In terms of content, we are pushing a lot of detail. Each character is about 3500 polygons and uses actual motion-captured animation. We also have some nice gameplay features to add detail. For instance, we modulate the fighters' speeds based on their stats, so a fighter with high agility has a higher base attack speed. The fighters become tired and attack slower if they throw too many punches or the fight drags on too long, so they become more vulnerable to counter-attacks. On the other hand, you can mitigate this by training up stamina.

This way players can think about strategy leading up to a fight as well as during the match: you can either conserve your energy to fight the long bout, or pummel your opponent with a barrage, hoping for an early KO.

We're also using a scoring system based on the real Marquess of Queensberry rules. Matt spent a few hours one day just researching the real scoring system — it's surprisingly complex!

Q: How is career mode handled? How many different opponents? Venues?

Adam: We're randomly generating tougher and tougher opponents for you as you raise through the ranks in career mode — the number of possibilities is pretty staggering. The actual number you'll fight from amateur up to winning the final title fight will depend upon the player's skill and career choices.

You progress by accumulating popularity, which you gain each fight along with some cash, but different fights give you bonuses for winning. Each time you choose a new fight, you are given a few options of different contracts to sign. Some fights let you earn money faster to upgrade equipment, while other fights can help you accrue popularity and move forward in the game faster.

Once you have earned enough popularity, you get a shot at challenging the champ in your current tier to win his title and move into the next tier. You also get a change of scenery and soundtrack as you move along.

Q: How is the game controlled? Any use of the accelerometer?

Adam: Fundamentally, you're controlling your boxer's left and right hands with your left and right thumbs. Taps, swipes, and holds will result in jabs, hooks, uppercuts, blocks, and the like.

Everyone who has played the game so far has found it pretty intuitive. We use the accelerometer for dodging — it's a more advanced skill, but it's definitely satisfying to have your opponent miss entirely as you duck and bob out of the way!

Q: Have you licensed any actual boxers in game or are the players ficticious?

Adam: Actual fighters is something that is definitely in the long term plan of this game! it is a long process to secure rights for celebrity endorsements of characters, let's just say it's a good thing we're working with Chillingo! Our character creator has lots of options, though, so players ought to be able to come up with a fighter they're happy with, whether he's an approximation of their favorite real boxer or their (giant, muscular) uncle.

We have plans for updates after release to add more fighters and envrionments, so players should keep their eyes peeled for special announcements and opportunities and of course comment on websites where we can see what they would like. We really want players to "get in the game" so to speak…

Q: Does the game feature online / WiFi multiplayer, Online leaderboard?

A: We'd love to do multiplayer as a future free update — especially after iPhone OS 3.0 is released and we can use the announced multiplayer over Bluetooth capability. For now, though, we're focusing on the single-player game. We have a full-on career mode where you're rising through the ranks earning fame and cash, and a quickplay mode for folks that just want a quick bout while they wait for the bus. We will launch the game with online leaderboards, which we'll rank by your career's all-time record, as well as achievement tracking (similar to blurst.com).

Q: When will the game be coming out? Price?

Adam: Our number one priority is having a top quality game, so we want to release it when it is ready. That being said, if we take Apple's approval process into account, it is looking like it is on track for a release sometime in June.

We are not officially announcing a price point yet, but we are looking in the middle range. What I will say is that we ourselves are gamers and know how important it is to feel like you actually get your money's worth when you pay for a product. It is the developers' obligation to make sure that when they ask players to pay, they deliver an experience of commensurate value. On the plus side, because we are only two people, we don't have to charge quite as much to get a return on our investment.

TouchArcade: Thanks Adam for providing additional details about Touch KO.

Here is a gameplay video that was previously released that shows off the features:

We'll be providing a much closer look at the game once it comes out and keep tabs on its progress over the next few weeks.

Firemint provided detailed answers in two separate posts: one and two. We've included some of the highlights below:

Q: Seems like this is going for the "sim" racing experience (which has been missing from app store thus far). As such i feel the physics engine will need to be great to achieve that. … What sort of effects are included in the physics model? Will things like tyre grip, aerodynamics, centrifugal affects, downforce, drag, fuel – weight etc be modeled accurately?

Firemint: I am continually surprised by the depth of knowledge on these forums. All the things you mentioned are included in our model except for fuel and its effect on changing the weight. Having said that, our aerodynamic modelling is pretty simplified.

One critical component of the car model is suspension and the way that the weight of the car shifts to different tyre patches and affects steering, braking and acceleration forces. When it comes to car simulation, weight shifting and the rubber on the road is 90% of the problem. Centrifugal effects arise naturally from the rigid body physics model. Aerodynamics, engine and drive train simulation are all important but can be simulated to 90% accuracy with extremely simple approximations (so that is how we simulated them, simply). They tend not to make or break the fun factor.

After including all of these things, we have had to manipulate the model to ensure that it is, above all, heaps of fun. We are aiming for the handling to feel fun and realistic and you have to make some compromises on realism to achieve this. However we aren't just tearing up the rule book like a street racing game. In that sense, we still say that we are a sim.

One example of a little cheat that maybe I shouldn't admit to: all the cars are modelled like a rear wheel drive. This is fine for the muscle cars, but probably not so realistic for hatchbacks which should be front wheel drive. However, we think rear wheel drive behaviour is more fun than front wheel drive!

Q. Will other AI cars make mistakes or try and take you out?

Yes, they are actually quite mean at the moment, but you can be equally mean back. We have tried to make the AI a little more like how people play. Instead of getting everything perfect, they will sometimes slide out themselves and get in trouble. There are moments in the videos where you can see this. We're still refining the AI and with further focus testing we may still change our approach on this.

Q. Can we play music from iPod, with sound effects?

Firemint: Yes.

Q. Are the cars and tracks unique or based on real life versions?

Firemint: They are unique. We had a lot of discussions surrounding licensing early on, and it wasn't an easy decision not to go for it. The decision to avoid licensing was to maintain the fullest creative control. Once we made this decision, we actually felt quite liberated. We are now able to focus on a very pure sort of design.

Q. Is their online muliplayer like in Raging Thunder. Or even just local WiFi multiplayer? I'm talkin' trading paint, not comparing times…

Firemint: We’ll be able to answer these questions closer to release!

Q. Is there car damage?

Firemint: No. We like the idea but there are tradeoffs involved. We haven't ruled out car damage as a future direction for Real Racing.

Q: In previous videos we saw awesome graphics. Although they still look good, what happened? They look downgraded…

Firemint: It’s hard to answer this, because the game on device is looking better than ever. Screenshots and videos are something different from the actual game. Some of those screenshots look very unflattering compared to the real thing. The videos are probably more representative than screenshots but they suffer from their own problems.

There have been occasional mentions of frame rate problems in the video. This kind of makes me cry, because the problem is with the HD video playback in Flash and often Firefox, not the game. My computer cannot play back HD video from YouTube at more than 10 or 15 fps, and sometimes it is really choppy. Most computers can play it back fine, I think it is related to Firefox and Flash 9. This is not about Internet bandwidth, it is about the video playback engine itself. I can tell you that the game is running smoother than the video, even when the video is playing back as intended.

Also, while speaking of frame rate, our 1080i video camera cannot effectively capture at more than 25 fps because of the interlacing. The game however gets fps of up to 40. The more technical people here will understand the potential aliasing issues this introduces in the video.

Another example of unflattering shots is when you capture dynamic reflective lighting in a screenshot. A screenshot captures only one moment in time, but it is the movement of light over a surface that impresses.

There are other issues too, like color balance etc. Long and short of it: We don't have the online tools to demonstrate to you how smoothly the game runs and how beautiful the graphics and effects are on device. Like a photographer, sometimes you can capture what you are seeing and experiencing, sometimes you can't.

There is so much to talk about on this subject that maybe I should blog about it sometime. We have gone to lengths to provide raw assets, whether we consider them representative or not. So we are frustrated to see some games provide off-device screenshots and say "don't worry it is 'representative'". We are giving you raw stuff, as high def as we can get it, because we don’t want to use those tricks.

Q: Bonus question: A few people have commented on the apparent difficulty of staying on the track.

Firemint: …we got a bit carried away by the cool offroad effects and included too many of those in the video. The cars aren't on rails so while it's possible to go off road, a decent driver won't have any problems staying on.

To read the other answers, please visit the original discussion thread, and our original interview article which includes a high definition video of the game.

Firemint's Real Racing will become available in the App Store in April.

Most of these games, albeit graphically appealing, are your typical street and track racers with few unique perks that really set them apart from each other.

SlotZ Racer [App Store] was one of the first games to break the mold and really bring back that old nostalgia of racing when you were a kid (and I'm not talking about video games). SlotZ Racer puts you back in your fleece jumpsuit pajamas with a plastic Tyco trigger grip in hand for some down home electric slot racin'!

With a one of a kind physics feel, tracks that make your finger beg to let up and a new way of making your own custom tracks, SlotZ Racer promises to stay snuggled your devices dock screen for some time.

Touch Arcade had the pleasure of chatting with Aaron “Zwilnik” Fothergil (pictured)l, Lead Programmer of SlotZ Racer, one of the more popular and unique racing games for the "iPlatform". We got more than we expected out of Aaron as he explained what it took to develop and extensively update this racer and also what's in store for SlotZ future. Can you say Wi-Fi multiplayer? Also, exclusive screenshots of our discussions content.

Vontara XT car with trailing view

Alex – TA: Hi, Aaron, how are you?

Zwilnik: Overworked as usual, but otherwise good.

Alex – TA: Before we begin talking on your latest game title, can you tell us a little about yourself and your development team?

Zwilnik: I'm the coding and game design half of Strange Flavour, along with my brother Adam who handles all the art and sound. We've both been working in the games industry for what's getting to be a combined total of nearly 40 years now and I feel really old.

Alex – TA: Your latest game is SlotZ Racers. Can you tell us a bit about how SlotZ was conceived and what developing the game was like?

Zwilnik: I've been a motor racing nut (especially Formula 1) since I was a kid and used to be very heavily into Scalextric (a UK brand of 1/32nd scale slot cars) models and track building. Despite this, I've never actually written a racing game and didn't want to write a 'normal' racing game on any platform. We'd actually been messing with a rough prototype of SlotZ that we'd knocked up a year or so ago, but with other projects on the go it was put into the "stuff we really should do at some point" file. Then when we started working on the iPhone, Adam and I saw that it might suit particularly well as it would give you a racing game that didn't rely on steering (bypassing the whole issue of what sort of tilt control to use) and we could even use the multi-touch to handle 4 players on one iPhone. We really like doing social party gaming.

As we'd just finished Flick Sports Fishing [App Store] for Freeverse, they let us loose to see what we could come up with. The major chunk of the game was written over the Christmas break, so Adam and I were able to sit down and get most of the game done without any distractions, so Freeverse could preview it at MacWorld while throwing their QA team into a "Happy New year, get to work!" mode.

Alex – TA: Your telling me this was accomplished with only two people?

Zwilnik: Yes, mostly. Adam and I tend to do most of the actual development work on our projects as we can throw data and ideas between us that much faster, having worked together for so long. We also get the benefit of our publishing partnership with Freeverse, who we can draw on for extra artwork, testing and handy snippets of code when we need them. We don't sleep much.

Alex – TA: Unlike any other iPlatform racer currently released, SlotZ physics are very tuned to the way actual electric slot cars work. What kind of research did you have to undertake to capture the feel?

Zwilnik: Research and Development is the fun part of working in video games. Apart from my experience of playing with Scalextric sets for years, we decided that we needed to get input on the other popular scales, so we bought a couple of Carrera 1/43rd scale sets (smaller, faster cars which rely more on magnets to stay on the track) and the guys at Freeverse happened to know a chap called Bob Marketos (Slotcar Bob as he's known, or SlotzBob in the game ) who's an expert HO scale racer and who's very involved in HO slot cars in the US. For some reason or other, our mum also caught the motor racing hobby, so we were also able to visit her on the excuse of being loving sons etc. and test all the cars and track she's collected. That gave us a pretty wide base of data to create the game with and then it was a case of balancing the needs of the casual gamer with the pro slot car racers, which is one reason why we decided to put so many options in SlotZ Racer.

Alex – TA: What hand did Freeverse have in your development and publishing?

Zwilnik: We're lucky with our publishing partnership with Freeverse in that we gain all their skills and resources to help us out. For SlotZ, we had most of the actual code and resources in hand, but Freeverse was able to do a huge chunk of the testing, sort out all the issues of marketing and submitting the app to Apple as well as general moral support and supplying a handy reality check from time to time. I also swap code with the team at Freeverse, so we help each other out with useful code tricks. Because we don't need to worry so much about a lot of the paperwork and general running around and shouting, we can focus a bit more on actually writing the game.

Alex – TA: Right now SlotZ has 4 players on one device. Any plans on making SlotZ into a network multiplayer game so 4 or more can race from their own screen?

Zwilnik: Absolutely. Wi-Fi multiplayer has been on the board from day 1, but we want to make sure its spot on. Given all the options and the speed of SlotZ, that's not a straightforward task, so rather than include a not so great network game experience in the release version of SlotZ and rather than delay the release of the game when most people will play it on a single iPhone, we decided to work on it for a future update. That way we can add it in when it's fun to play and right.

Alex – TA: You just released a rather large update in version 1.1, can you tell us about the major additions to the game and how they differ from any other racer out there?

Zwilnik: The v1.1 update gave us the chance to put a lot of features in that weren't practical to do for the initial release. It also gave us a chance to see how gamers were playing the 1.0 version and get useful feedback from them.

It turned into quite a large update, but the main features were that we were able to get our track server up and running, so we could add the Track Manager and the ability to send tracks to one another via email or over Wi-Fi, as well as adding a scenery system to the track editor along with another 4 new cars, new camera modes and a lot of new options.

SlotZ is unique in having such a simple control system, so you can focus on racing the other cars without worrying about the steering. That means it can be a lot faster action and reaction and of course makes it practical to have 4 players sharing the touchscreen to play at once! It's also pretty unique in having a full blown track editor. This was a critical part of the design as all slot car fans know, making the tracks is half the fun!

Alex – TA: Multiplayer won't see the internet light of day?

Zwilnik: It may at a later date, but it'll take a much heavier code and may require the internet to be upgraded. When you've got a high speed racing game where you can do a lap in 3 seconds, a 1/5th second lag (pretty typical across the US) is a bit of a problem. There are 'ways' and there are always options. One thing we've considered as an extra option is to be able to record ghost car laps so you don't have to be online at the same time and can try and beat the best laps on the server. Internet play would be technically rather cool, but unless there's a large core group of players to keep it going, it's not really worthwhile for a casual game.

Alex – TA: Do you have a favorite track? Any other user made maps you particularly like?

Zwilnik: Of my own tracks, the Loopara SF track I designed while testing the new scenery editing features in the 1.1 update is probably my favourite, but my overall favourite tracks are from the user created tracks that have been appearing on the server. This is something I kind of expected as the tracks I were designing for the game had to be balanced across all the different car types and user skill levels, so there was a little bit of compromise in them. That and some of the users creating tracks obviously have a serious talent for it.

Here are some of my favourites (and their download codes).

Dusty Water (Code: HGMNR): This one's a nicely balanced track with a great fast section and a club style twiddly bit.

Mountain View (Code: GPMRH): I really like the use of scenery on this track.

Italian Stroll (Code: RNTTL): One of the earlier tracks to show up on the server, a great track that uses the new bridge heights to emulate a climb through twisty mountain roads.

Adam and I are toying with doing a “Track Cast”. A sort of top 5 tracks video podcast with track editing tips..

Alex – TA: Anything new your working on that can be announced during this interview?

Zwilnik: We've started on our next game, but that's top secret for the moment. We've also got localization of SlotZ underway (another benefit of working with Freeverse) and should have French, German, Italian and Spanish versions soon. As per requests of so many Touch Arcade readers, I'm also working on adding stunt track style sections. These appear to have been more popular in toy slot car sets aimed at kids in the U.S. rather than the more normal racing sets, so we decided to hold off on them until we could get some good data and work out the best way to add some of their features in, but once I get them working properly, they'll be fun!

SlotZ Track Editor – coming soon

Now we've got the track server up and running, we're adding functionality to it both for further updates to SlotZ Racer and our new free SlotZ Track Editor app which is just about to be submitted to the app store. The SlotZ Track Editor duplicates the editor that's in SlotZ Racer, but also gives you an online track browser that lets you look at and download all the user created tracks (over 250 so far!), edit them and copy them to SlotZ Racer or send them to your friends. It also acts as an extra set of storage for another 100 tracks and gives gamers who've not bought SlotZ Racer yet a chance to have a look at the track editing that's in the game.

We're also expanding the server's functionality so that you'll be able to access it through the web. The 1.1.1 update to SlotZ Racer that's going through Apple approval at the moment already lets you create SlotZ track URLs that will automatically download and launch a track into SlotZ and we're looking at letting possible fan sites have the ability to add track search functionality to their sites.

Alex – TA: Is there anything else you'd like to say?

Zwilnik: Thanks for letting me waffle on and I'd also like to thank the Touch Arcade users and all the other gamers who've been giving us feedback on SlotZ and helping the game grow around its players.

Alex – TA: Thanks for your time Aaron “Zwilnik”.

Zwilnik: No problem. Glad to do it.

You can check out SlotZ Racer and the other titles by Strange Flavour Ltd at http://www.strangeflavour.com. Also check out the full lineup of Freeverse games at http://www.freeverse.com/.

App Store Games by Strange Flavour: SlotZ Racer, Flick Fishing, Plank

Guest post written by Alex

Ng:moco is responsible for Topple [App Store] and MazeFinger [App Store] and will also be publishing the highly anticipated platformer Rolando.

Young revealed a number of insightful observations and predicitions concering the future of iPhone gaming.  He believes that in order for the iPhone gaming market to realize its potential, it has to get to the place where developers can reach an average per user revenue in the neighborhood of the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS–an average of $53.50 spent on games per year.  ($0.99 game pricing isn't likely to do it.)  As well, the company plans on bringing an Xbox Live-type experience (achievements, friend management, etc.) to the iPhone.  And as for the newly introduced Android handset, Young doesn't see it being much competition for the iPhone as far as mobile gaming is concerned.

Young is also quite enthusiastic about their upcoming title Rolando which was created by independent developer Simon Oliver. Young has been so impressed by Oliver that he compares the Rolando developer to Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto.

Touch Arcade: Thanks for speaking with us, Neil.  It's been quite a big few days for you and ng:moco of late, what with the recent release of Topple and Maze Finger as well as the announcement of ng:moco as the publisher of Rolando.

Neil Young: Yes, it has.  I think it said in the press release but we have over a dozen games that we're working on and planning to release in the next few months and Maze Finger and Topple are the first of the fast apps and then we've got a number of premium apps of which Rolando is the first one and we're super super excited about that.

[ Read on for the full interview transcription. Omitted from this interview transcription are portions concerning ng:moco's upcoming iPhone take on a Geometry Wars / Thrust combination, which we detailed in an earlier post. ]

On Rolando

Touch Arcade: Rolando has been quite eagerly anticipated from what we've seen in our forums and in the comment threads.  People are really excited about the game.  It seems like a perfect iPhone platform game across the board.

Neil Young: Yea, and it's actually an awesome–a really awesome piece of software.  As a game maker myself, just being able to find not just Rolando but someone like Simon [Oliver] who created Rolando– being able to work with people like that is always such a pleasure.  He is just such a natural game creator.  He could be the first Miyamoto of the iPhone

Touch Arcade: I don't think I saw a specific release date or price set for Rolando.  Have they been decided upon or are they up in the air right now?

Neil Young: You saw in the trailer that it's coming "holiday 2008," and that's absolutely the target.  We're committed to release the very best game, so calling a specific day right now probably wouldn't be prudent–we want to make sure that every game that we make is something people are delighted with.

Touch Arcade: And price?

Neil Young: We have an internal thought on that right now–we haven't announced it yet.  The marketplace on the iPhone is developing pretty rapidly.  You know, if we had had a conversation about what do we think the average price of software is going to be be on the iPhone, three months ago, it would be just very different than it is today.  And I think we're pretty excited about the usage pattern of the device and how frequently people are interacting with the games.  I think we've got to come up with–and this is not necessarily specific to Rolando but to any games we deliver on the platform–we've got to come up with the sort of pricing packages and policies that integrate well with how people are consuming software on the device.

On ng:moco

Touch Arcade: It seems to me–and I know you came from Electronic Arts–that ng:moco is trying to be, for the iPhone, what EA represented to home computer users back in the '80s, sort of bringing together all of the quality developers, both in-house and out.

Neil Young: Probably similar, at least in terms of where the independent development community is kind of at. When EA started with the "can a computer game make you cry" ad and it had that collection of great software artists: Bill Budge, Dave Maynard, etc., and all those guys sitting together like rock stars–the thing that was true then that's true now is there was this sort of incredible excitement in a core group of people about making games for, at that time, home computers.

I come from, now, the much more mature version of that industry and the excitement is the ability to make games in microstudios with a small core group of people on a device that's as powerful as the iPhone. So there's the same sort of level of excitement and, for us, rather than try to build the biggest internal development staff that we can, we want to try to stimulate as much of that in the independent development community and try to help people start their own micro studios or make the leap from the large companies that they're a part of, working on a giant title where they're one of sixty people, to go be a creative leader on something of their own invention.

Touch Arcade: So what is ng:moco's value-add?  Why would a developer want to partner with you rather than going straight to the App Store on his or her own?

Neil Young: I would say that the number one value-add, aside from the ability to be able to finance, promote, or market the title, the number one value-add that we bring above and beyond that, frankly, is experience with game makers.  We have great game producers working on our stuff that have made fabulous games.

The ability to be able to–for someone like Simon–to be able to sit down with us and be able to brainstorm through "How do we make these games the very best?  What do we need to do with the controls?  What do we need to do with how the game looks, how the game boots, how the game functions?"–that experience has been hard-earned for us and it's something I think we can really help independent developers with.

Now in addition to that, it's very rare–and Simon is a rare case here–it's very rare that one individual is able to cover every piece of the puzzle, so what you tend to find are teams that kind of over-index in a given area.  They might over-index in engineering or over-index in game design or even visual presentation.  So having people on our staff that can help them in the areas that need a little extra polish or extra push is another sort of value-add that we provide, because at the end of the day, everybody wins if we're able to create games that excel in terms of the quality of their engineering, the quality of their game design, the quality of their presentation and the appeal to the marketplace.

Those are the sort of tangible values we offer and we do have sort of a package of technology that we provide to all of the developers we work with that allows them to instrument their software so they can really try to make the games the very, very best that they can possibly be.

And over time, that package of tech, we hope, will be able to evolve into a sort-of Xbox Live for the iPhone that allows friend management, leaderboards, and–you see in our games there are the simple achievement systems, and so we want to provide to customers a really rich and powerful kind of network and social framework for them to enjoy games with us.

On iPhone's Future and Pricing Decisions

Touch Arcade: Many criticized Apple for not rolling something like that out along with the iPhone.  I don't think I'm alone in finding online scoreboards and the like a big motivation to pick a game back up and really learn its in and outs.  Perhaps ng:moco is in a position to fill the gap that Apple left at launch.

Neil Young: I think you want to start small there right?  You want to start building features in all of your games that can contribute to  system-wide scoring or something like that.  You want the ability to have network leaderboards–just simply the ability to hit a score and for that score to be ranked and viewable by everybody without having to tab out to a website.  Also in your friends groups, you can start layering in not just the entire universe of people who are playing but people who are your friends as well.  Then it becomes–it just brings it closer to home.  You might not be the star of the gaming universe, but you're the star of your friends group, at least.

In general we're trying to build a business that can release two to four really great things in any given month.  That sort of bounces between fast apps–you saw in the first two what we meant by micropricing–we want to be able to deliver games that, when you download them, they just exceed your expectations.

That sort of permeates our thinking, so the fast apps kind of fit in that realm and get defined by that and then the premium applications those are things that we have to kind of craft even more carefully if you like, that have a slightly different scale to them.  And they range from Rolando, which feels like a very traditional handheld console sort of experience in the untraditional handheld console wrapper of the iPhone through one or two very broadly appealing types of titles and then two very progressive titles.  One thing we've been very committed to as a company is taking core game compulsions and trying to paint them across the landscape that is the iPhone–and it's not just touchscreen and accelerometer.  The iPhone has a contacts list in there, it's got a camera, it's got media, it's location aware, it's got the network connection.  You have a very personal and emotional relationship with it so we think that there are some relly intersting games you can build / paint across that canvas.  So some of the later premium apps, which will ship after the holiday seasion, are just a bit more progressive in terms of their game design ambition.

Touch Arcade: I've personally been surprised at how resistant people are to the pricing of these games.  You hear, "Oh, I would never pay more than $4.99 for an iPhone game–this game looks great but costs $5.99, so forget it."  I have a Nintendo DS and a Sony PSP and am used to paying $20, $30, $40 for quality mobile games on those platforms.  There aren't many $10 games for those units.  What do you think about this situation?

Neil Young: I think it's sort of a function of the pool in which they're swimming.  If you're expectations are being set by titles priced at $0.99 or $4.99 or $5.99 you're going to end up comparing everything to that versus a completely different device that you might not even own or have an attraction with.

The market has to develop in such a way from an industry standpoint where we can generate an average revenue per user that's much more like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS.  I think the way we're going to get there is going to end up being very different because the platform and distribution mechanics are very different.  For this market to fulfull its potential, you really have get to the place where you can reach an average revenue per user of PSP or DS levels–and the PSP is about $45 per user annualy and the DS is about $62 per user annualy, so with $.99 pricing it seems unlikely to me that people are going to buy 62 $0.99 games.

Touch Arcade: When you spoke at the iPhone Dev Camp 2 back in August, you indicated that you felt there weren't any really good games yet avaialble for the iPhone platform.  Has your opinion on that changed since then?

Neil Young: You know, that's a good question.  Has my opinion changed?  Here's a sad statement: not really.

There are some things that are interesting–I wouldn't call these "good" games–but I think what SGN is doing with iGolf and iBaseball points to interesting data about what people want to do with their device and how they show it off and talk about it, and I think that's interesting. Fieldrunnners is, I guess, a good looking tower defense game.  The fact that it released without music and sound effects kind of made me scratch my head there.  And so we think that tower defense as a model is actually a really interesting sort of core mechanic, but we need to move it beyond just the graphical enhancements.

We need to start asking ourselves "what can you do with an iPhone?", but i think that's sort of an interesting indicator.  But that's probably it, I would say.

On the Competition

Touch Arcade: The first Android device, the G1 handset, was recently unveiled.  We've done some digging and found that the underlying hardware is rather capable–it does not seem to be lacking in the hardware department when compared to the iPhone.  (Of course it has to be programmed in Java and Android will likely run on less capable handsets, as well.)  What are your thoughts about the Android's potential as a mobile games platform?

Neil Young: I think there's a long way for Android to go before it's in the place that the iPhone is.  You know the hardware of the iPhone is important, but it's not the most important piece of the puzzle.

Touch Arcade: As with the Wii…

Neil Young: Exactly!  It's exactly like the Wii, like the DS vs. PSP or the Wii vs the 360.  It's really about the interface.  It's about the usability.  It's about how that usability harnesses the capabilities in order to generate new usage patterns that people want to do things with.  In the case of the Wii–the new usability with the Wiimote–it harnessed the capabilities of the device in a new way and it changed the usage pattern.  It's like Guitar Hero.  You know, the interface of Guitar Hero, combined with the software on the device, created new usage patterns that created new markets.

That's really, to me, why the iPhone is in the position that it's in.  It's a well engineered, good performing device, but above all else it's got a beautiful interface that's just changing the way people are thinking about cell phones.  And so, you know, it would be interesting if other platforms can get there, but i don't think they get there just with a set of software and hardware standards.  I think they have to get there with great industrial design and great user interface design.