Carmack & Mustaine Talk Doom Resurrection For the iPhone 57
themacgamer writes "Luis Sosa had a chance to sit down with John Carmack and Tom Mustaine of id Software and discuss Doom Resurrection for the iPhone: 'At the start we thought it was just a touch screen, so you'd tap to shoot the monsters, but it was never fun; it felt too clinical. It didn't feel like you were swinging your heavy gun around to bring down the monster before he chews off your head,' said Carmack. Mustaine added, '[The shooting mechanic] was definitely a trial-and-error thing. You said the word "distilled," and that's definitely a word we've been using. We really wanted to distill the visceral Doom experience into the iPhone.' He also said, '... we have P2P co-op play that's not in the shipping version, but will come later. We didn't expect the 3.0 OS out so quickly! Two players join together, they see each other's cursors, and they either compete or co-op for a score. We're hoping to patch it in down the road. We're also looking at additional levels and potentially some stat-tracking stuff as well.'"
I'm more excited about Doom Classic on the iPhone (Score:5, Insightful)
I bought Wolf3D for the iPhone on a whim, expecting it to be your typical iPhone game with stuttering gameplay and sluggish controls, but it really surprised me in how well it played.
I think it's easy to just think of Carmack as a genius programmer but he also really knows how to tune a game to be fun too, from reading Carmack's blog about developing iPhone Wolf3D it's clear he put a lot of thought and effort into streamlining the gameplay. He removed the high score from the game as it was fairly superfluous. He also dropped having a finite number of lives in the game so you can restart a level whenever you want. He rightly noticed that too many controls are a pain so he made door trigger automatic (like Quake). Best of all he added an auto-map to help make sense of the maze-like levels (using the old maze solving algorithm of hugging the left wall works well for most levels ;) ).
On top of all that he also wrote a game that maintains a steady frame rate and has very responsive and comfortable controls (which is very unusual in iPhone games). So, with all that in mind, I'm really champing at the bit to get his port of Doom Classic, but it still hasn't been released. I can only assume they're waiting for Doom Resurrection sales to drop off before releasing another Doom game to avoid cannibalising sales. Doom Resurrection is OK, but the tilt controls aren't that great and being on-rails it's missing the fun of being able to explore a level yourself at your own pace.
Apparently Duke Nukem is on the way as well. I hope they do as good a job of porting that as Carmack did with Wolf3D. Now if LucasArts could be persuaded to port Dark Forces and Jedi Knight.... ;)
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A better idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
My point was that if you say anything remotely bad, you are likely to get modded down. Check around on some other stories and I think you'll find it to be true.
I've been on Slashdot a long time and I totally believe you about moderation abuses on this site. I've seen seen the ones you're talking about.
But I wanted to mention there's another side to this story. The excitement over the iPhone generated a backlash. Lots of people here started looking for reasons to not like it. (I'm sure PS3 owners know what I'm talking about.) It has gotten to a point where you can tell when somebody's making a legit complaint and when somebody's just mindlessly parroting something they've heard from somebody else. I agree, there's more nuance to it than most topics, but you are talking about something lots of people here have personal experience with.
To put it a little more succinctly: The zealotry will die down when the hatred does. Again, ask any PS3 owner about that.
Re:I'm more excited about Doom Classic on the iPho (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but you're gushing because Wolf3D doesn't suffer from "stuttering gameplay and sluggish controls" on a 400 Mhz device (with hardware FPU) and an OpenGL ES compliant GPU? Wolf3D was released in 1992, and designed to run on a 286! If it wasn't as smooth as silk then either Carmack or Apple would suck immensely. The iPhone can easily handle at least Quake 2 level engines, which is 3 generations more advanced than Wolf3D.
As someone who ported Wolf3D, Quake 1 and Quake 2 to Pocket PC over half a decade ago, I think Carmack is a bit late in entering the mobile arena with his engines. Back then everything was 100% software rendering with no FPU, requiring conversion to fixed point math to have a respectable framerate. I will say that first person shooters are right at home with devices with an actual D-Pad and touchscreen (classic PDA form factor, Nintendo DS). The D-Pad is used for motion (forward / backward and strafing), and the touchpad controls mouse-look. Firing can be an problem, but many of the Pocket PC devices allowed you to push straight in on the D-Pad for "Enter", this providing a perfect integrated fire button.
iPhone has some good capabilities, but it is also severely handicapped in certain areas, which is why Carmack produced light gun shooter, sans light gun, instead of an actual FPS.