As a followup to yesterday's inteview with ngmoco CEO Neil Young, this morning we spoke with Freeverse President Ian Lynch Smith to hear what the recent purchase of Freeverse by ngmoco means to them. The full audio is attached below, but here is a summary of the talk.
Originally founded in 1994, Freeverse's earliest titles were Mac shareware games. They later branched out in to games for Windows, XBOX Live Arcade, and most recently the iPhone. Freeverse's MotoChaser was one of the few 3D games that launched with the App Store. Also immediately available were Big Bang Sudoku and Jared. They then went on to release a catalog of great iPhone games, both developed in house and and by outside developers published by Freeverse.
Since the surprise announcement yesterday of ngmoco's purchase of Freeverse, what we've all been wondering is what is going to change. Ngmoco has recently shifted gears to an entirely free to play business model, while Freeverse has been happily releasing massively successful 99¢ games like Skee-Ball and Flick Fishing while working on highly anticipated games such as Warpgate.
The short answer of what is going to change initially is almost nothing, with very little changing in the future aside from the shift in payment models. According to Ian Lynch Smith, they wouldn't have done the deal if it wasn't for the shared vision between both companies, as each of them focus on the iPhone and iPhone OS. This doesn't mean they're abandoning the Mac games, applications, and everything else they do either. Freeverse will remain its own company in Brooklyn, just as a wholly owned subsidiary of ngmoco.
In addition, Freeverse will continue to publish the works of other iPhone developers, with the same level of quality and care we've seen in the past. As Smith put it, "[Ngmoco] did not buy Freeverse to make radical changes. They bought us because of our success, and they bought us because of what we've been doing right."
From Freeverse's perspective, the main motivation behind agreeing to this deal is the immense potential for growth. Through the years they've done everything they could to reach a larger audience, originally starting with shareware, then making the jump to retail shelves, then bringing their games to both the PC and XBOX, and finally jumping on the iPhone.
In regards to ngmoco's recent push to "freemium" games, Smith said, "We wouldn't have done this if we didn't think there wasn't more growth and more possibilities to reach more people in the free to play model." He cites people (now teenagers) who have grown up playing high quality free flash games as well as the massive successes seen in Asian markets as proof that the free to play model works.
Ian seems open to all forms of free to play games currently, including a one-time purchase to unlock all the features and functionality of a game– Something often requested by forum members regarding ngmoco's TouchPets and Eliminate. Freeverse has no intention of "nickel and diming" gamers, and plans on just being smart about how these things are implemented.
While he was reluctant to comment on future game development, when asked if they were still going to provide substantial gameplay experiences for gamers to enjoy instead of Farmville-like games, Smith simply responded "Yes" and mentioned a "substantial game" being discussed behind the scenes.
Freeverse admits they have much to learn about the free to play world, but with the combined expertise of ngmoco, they hope to release compelling games that can be played at no cost to the player, while providing optional in-game purchases for players who spend hours a day playing. They're hoping this will result in games that see the same exponential growth that the iPhone in general has enjoyed, instead of the current linear growth patterns Freeverse sees now.
Prior to this recent acquisition by ngmoco, Freeverse has never had investors and has been profitable on their own for the last 15 years. According to Smith, the main motivation for agreeing to the purchase was to "swing for the fences" and feels we're at a major moment in time, an inflection point, where we're going to see an explosion of mobile gaming.
"At the end of the day, we are just trying to sell our games in a way that lets us grow and continue making more games," Smith explained.
We recommend listening to the entire interview yourself, which is included here.
Ngmoco's CEO Neil Young took some time to speak with TouchArcade about their just-announced acquisition of Freeverse. The response to the acquisition in our comments and forums has been very lively both about the overall move as well as the adoption of the freemium model.
In the interview, we addressed their choice of Freeverse as a target, as well as their move into freemium content. The full audio recording is included in our podcast format, while a summary is transcribed here.
Addressing why they choose Freeverse, Young was very complimentary about the company and described them as "wonderful people" who shared their vision and values while also having a pool of talented people and intellectual properties that complemented Ngmoco. Freeverse will remain functionally independent and retain the Freeverse brand. According to Young, to the outside world, things won't look very different initially.
One hot topic amongst our readers is Ngmoco's recent move towards a freemium model — where games are free to download and revenue is generated through in-app purchases. The reason for this move was a combination of factors according to Young. Despite the running speculation, the move was not in response to the high piracy rates on the iPhone.
Instead, there were two main factors. First, they felt that there was a large pool of App Store customers who only participated in the free-download side of the store that were not being captured in the traditional model. Young cited download numbers 10-20x higher for the top free apps compared to the paid apps. And, second, in looking into the future of the App Store, they saw a general trend away from higher priced premium games, and towards these type of games that can be played over time.
Interestingly, Young admits that the first incarnations of their freemium models for Eliminate Pro and Touch Pets Dogs were somewhat "clumsy" and "1.0" versions of the model (and to be followed by 2.0, 3.0 etc…). Part of this is attributed to the fact that neither game was originally conceived to be freemium. Young said, however, they have continued to learn and made ongoing adjustments to the model for their upcoming games including God Finger and We Rule, and beyond.
Finally, Young confirms that Freeverse's existing games including the upcoming Warp Gate won't be affected by the acquisition, but that future games will be designed around the freemium model.
We recommend listening to the entire interview yourself, which is included here.
Venan Entertainment is the creator of the recently released Space Miner: Space Ore Bust, which we absolutely loved in our review. Space Miner is the first game from Venan, but we liked it so much that we decided to feature them in this week's developer profile.
Brandon Curiel, the CEO of Venan, was kind enough to agree to be interviewed by us, and I got the chance to find out a little bit more about him, his company, and his games.
Touch Arcade: Could you give us a brief history of the company? How did you start off?
Brandon Curiel: Venan started in the summer of 2002 in my spare bedroom. We had just left a dot com bust, and having worked in games prior to that, the five of us we decided we wanted to get back into that market. Our initial target was the Xbox, and we spent a year working on a game demo and shopping it around, but didn’t have much luck. So with our savings getting low, we decided to switch gears and aim for something more modest – mobile development. Our first game, Super Putt Classic, got sold into Sprint by Mforma (now Hands On Mobile) and from there they started offering us contracts to do new games. One game led to another, and to another, and eventually we built up our business being a third party mobile developer.
We got started on the iPhone pretty early with a contract from EA to bring Monopoly over, which we had done on mobile and the regular iPod. It was like a breath of fresh air after having to deal with the fragmented Java/Native landscape for so long. Since then we’ve done four iPhone games, three for EA and one for Sega, but Space Miner is the first one we’ve developed as an internal title. We’re hoping to be able to dedicate more resources to internal titles going forward.
The Venan Entertainment crew
Touch Arcade: What was the inspiration for Space Miner?
Brandon Curiel: Space Miner is an interesting story, because there was no direct inspiration for it. Initially we were just trying to prototype a control scheme. The idea was to use the accelerometer to determine the device orientation such that when the user turned the device, we’d take the world and pivot it around the player. Seeing some of the success smaller developers were having, we thought we’d knock out a quick game with this nifty control scheme idea, so we brainstormed for some ideas that might work. Eventually we settled on a classic asteroids style game.
Since we’re not talking about the game I just described, something obviously didn’t work. To be blunt, the whole idea was a colossal mess. I can say that, since it was my idea! There were so many problems, like not having anywhere to put a UI, getting tangled up in headphone cords, and the undeniable fact that flipping the device around like that was just not fun and liable to get it dropped. So, having developed an asteroids “engine”, we had to rethink what exactly we were going to do with it.
Having to start over again I think made us take a deeper look at the App Store to figure out what exactly was out there and where we could be different. What we found was that there were a lot of “snack” type games, but not a whole lot of the type of deeper games like those you’d find on the DS or a PSP. So, we decided to be different. Instead of going in the same direction as everyone else on the App Store, we decided to do back to our roots and just blow out the whole asteroids concept into something we’d want to play. And that meant narrative, RPG elements, and all the things that you see in Space Miner now.
Space Miner, the first game from Venan
Touch Arcade: What's a game that you'd love to make in the future?
Brandon Curiel: Dark Blossom. It’s a name that means nothing to anyone (it shouldn’t at least), but it’s a classic fantasy RPG we’ve had kicking in the background in one form or another for at least five years. Prior to Space Miner, we had been working on it as an original DS title, but gave up because the market there is very tough if you aren’t Nintendo. I’ve personally always wanted to make an epic fantasy RPG, so hopefully we’ll get the chance someday to port it over to the iPhone and try reviving it once more.
Also, Space Miner II. First since that will mean the first Space Miner was successful. But really we always have had a plan for a sequel and have tons of ideas we couldn’t get in the first one.
The Venan Entertainment offices
Touch Arcade: Who wrote the dialog for Space Miner? Can you tell me a little bit about the decision to make the game humorous in nature?
Brandon Curiel: The story was primarily a collaborative effort between me and Alex Kain, an associate designer here. I dealt more with the story elements and the arc, and Alex handled the actual writing (and re-writing) but we both did some of the other as well. We also brought in an extremely funny writer we worked with on Ninjatown, Robbie Telfer, to help “funny it up.”
As for humorous, well, I think that was a natural fit. Once we hit on the mining angle, it took all of 1.5 seconds for Uncle Jeb to be created in our minds, and that character is just funny out of the box. We wanted this to be fun, light, and accessible. We were just so sick and tired of all the dark, gritty stories you see in these games that have just been done to death. So the tone was very conscious, from the UI, to the plot, to the dialog, to even doing the space station as a bobbing 2D billboard.
Here's a gameplay trailer for Space Miner:
Touch Arcade: What's an interesting fact about your company?
Brandon Curiel: There’s an ongoing agreement with the employees that if we sell 100,000 units of Space Miner, I’ll get them a pinball machine. We have a long way to go though…
Daniel Zandelin, who is apparently a big fan of Mario Kart DS
Donut Games is the developer/publisher of well over a dozen iPhone games including fan-favorites like Rat On A Scooter XL, Comet Racer, and Cows in Space. Officially titled "Swedish Game Development Group AB," Donut Games has all of their games available in flash form on their website, where they can be played for free. With a arcade-like menu and three-star rating system for the levels in all their games, Donut Games has earned a large fanbase by consistently providing simple, quick experiences that draw players in for more, usually with a focus on increasing high scores.
I got the chance to find out a little bit more about one of the important faces behind the company, Daniel Zandelin, one of the founders of Donut Games.
Touch Arcade: What is the history of Donut Games as a company?
Daniel Zandelin: We're a small team of game enthusiasts, with roots going back to the good old days when the 8 and 16-bit gaming systems evolved. As a kid in the '80s I was quickly sucked into the intriguing gaming world of the Commodore 64, and together with my older brother, Ola, I grew an early interest of developing our own games, which lead to a bunch of quirky, buggy BASIC-games. Many years (and programming languages for that matter) later, in 2003, Ola started his own indie company to develop shareware games, and a couple of months later I quit my current job to join him.
The shareware market, which had just started to transform into the casual games market, was a blast! You could be a small team of 2-5 people and release quick, innovative downloadable games on the internet without the need for large budgets, and our titles (which we released under the Arcade Lab brand) were very well receieved.
As the casual games space and its portals grew more mature, productions grew bigger and a few certain genres got established and didn't leave much room for creativity or variety. So in 2006 we launched DonutGames.com, which started off as site for our Flash games. This project would give us our much needed room to play with new concepts and try out new ideas or whatever fun or crazy thing that popped into mind. When Apple announced the AppStore in 2008 and we started to dig deeper into the specs and SDK, we realizied this was the perfect platform for us: a device that you can carry with you anywhere you go, a store that is open for all and an excellent hardware to build your apps upon.
Comet Racer, one of our favorite creations from Donut Games
Touch Arcade: What exactly is your role within Donut Games? Could you tell us about some examples of your contributions to some of the company's games?
Daniel Zandelin: My role differs from one game to another, but my main areas of involvement are programming, sounds and last minute tweaking. The creation of a Donut game typically follows this flow: Ola, the concept master mind, brings up a new idea for a game, decides a theme to go with, and creates a mock-up of the basic artwork needed to get started. A programmer picks up the game and makes it playable, and we evaluate the result to see which elements are in place and what can be improved.
Once the basics are in, the level designers start working on the levels, and may eventually request more features from the programmer. In the last phase, I start working on the music and sounds. Once they're in, it's time for the final tweaking, which may or may not include additional visual effects, an extra mini game, and other last minute adjustments to make the game feel more solid. Simply put, Ola starts off the games, I finish them, and the whole Donut team is involved in the in-between.
Touch Arcade: What's the weirdest thing that has ever happened to you during your time with Donut Games?
Daniel Zandelin: This happens occasionally: When I'm sitting in a public place and a stranger next to me picks up an iPhone and after a few seconds I realize they just launched a Donut game. It's a weird feeling!
Rat On A Scooter XL, one of Donut Game's biggest sellers
Touch Arcade: If you had an unlimited budget to create an iPhone game, what sort of game would you make?
Daniel Zandelin: Back in the '90s, me and my brother started working on a really whacky point-and-click game for the Amiga in which players controlled a crazy kid with long greasy hair called Matthew. I don't remember all of the details of the story that we came up with for the game, but Matthew owned a tiny, aggressive poodle and had a secret band in his cellar together with his best friend who owned a shabby old Hammond organ. It would play like a “Get item A to unlock item B, use item B to find item C” sort of game, but instead of logical puzzles it would involve things like flushing yourself down the toilet to find certain items. I'm not sure everyone would appreciate a game like that for the iPhone, but if money was no issue it sure would be fun to bring this old concept to reality.
Touch Arcade: What is something that you'd personally like to do in a future game release?
Daniel Zandelin: I know that this may sound dull, but I'd like to continue with what we're currently doing. We have great fun creating these games, our model works really well for us and our fans seem to enjoy what we're doing.
Last month, we previewed an upcoming iPhone game from True Axis called Jet Car Stunts.
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.
It didn't take us long to fall in love with Tiger Style's first game, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [App Store]. It has a beautiful simplicity to it: you are a spider, and as a spider you spin webs and eat bugs. You can choose to explore the various rooms of Bryce Manor, or you can ignore your surroundings and just go on an insect feeding frenzy.
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.
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.
Doom Resurrection was released today [App Store] and we had an opportunity to speak with id Software's John Carmack and Escalation Studios' Tom Mustaine about the brand new title today in a telephone interview. We have also had time to play through the final version of the game and will be posting our review momentarily.
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.
The companies also spent a large amount of time experimenting with controls systems for the game, almost scrapping the game altogether about half way through. The original iteration of the game had a "tap to shoot" mechanic which was simply not-fun. It wasn't until they discovered the tilt to aim mechanic that they felt they had a compelling enough game. They are particularly proud of their implementation which has not been used in other iPhone games yet, and expect it will be imitated in the near future.
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.
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.
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.
At WWDC we had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Owen Goss of Streaming Colour Studios. Owen is a 30 year old former console programmer who decided to take a chance at starting his own game company last year. Owen had previously worked at EA as an interface and gameplay programmer as well as Propoganda Games and was most recently involved in the development of the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean game for the Xbox and PS3.
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.
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.
As a followup to yesterday's inteview with ngmoco CEO Neil Young, this morning we spoke with Freeverse President Ian Lynch Smith to hear what the recent purchase of Freeverse by ngmoco means to them. The full audio is attached below, but here is a summary of the talk.
In addition, Freeverse will continue to publish the works of other iPhone developers, with the same level of quality and care we've seen in the past. As Smith put it, "[Ngmoco] did not buy Freeverse to make radical changes. They bought us because of our success, and they bought us because of what we've been doing right."
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