If you want to gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to make a bleeding-edge iOS game, you can take a multi-year course on software development, or you can devout a few well-spent moments of your time to chat with John Carmack. Some of you out there may not be familiar with his name, but you’ll most certainly be aware of his work. As the lead designer on groundbreaking games such as Doom, Commander Keen and Quake, Carmack and id Software have helped to define the modern video game. Yesterday, Carmack’s latest creation--Rage--was made available in the iTunes App Store for all iOS devices. Despite his busy schedule, Carmack took the time to speak with us about the game.
Understandably, he’s more than a little enthusiastic about it.
“One of the real watch words for Rage on iOS is that I definitely wanted it to be a game that was replayable," says Carmack. "It had to be something that you could play through multiple times. A lot of our previous games were a lot of fun the first time through, but they didn’t replay very well. They got annoying as you had to step through certain areas. With Rage, it’s all action all the time. I can remember play-testing Doom Resurrection and it was a chore. I’d been through it, I’d seen it and I wasn’t having any fun playing it again, but I played Rage every day...I always played to the end of the levels because it was still fun.”
Utilizing a proprietary graphics engine, Rage is easily one of the prettiest games currently available for iOS. Depending on what hardware you’re rocking, it can be enjoyed in either standard or high-definition. No matter which version you choose to purchase, the graphics are startling: not only for the blood-soaked violence they portray, but also their clarity, fluidity of motion and overall sense of realism... were murderous mutants a meatspace reality, that is. Carmack explains that in order to produce such a good-looking game, while at the same time still ensuring the application’s playability, some tough decisions needed to be made before he and his team wrote a single line of code. One of the most difficult decisions Carmack and the rest of his team at id Software made was whether or not they should produce a free-roaming game of exploration in the spirit of the Doom franchise, or look to the development of the more tightly-controlled high quality shooter-on-rails product that we see in the App Store today.
“There were design, development and technology forces that pushed us in the direction that we went," explains Carmack. “Rage is a rail-shooter, and that was the initial design question on here...You’re not trying to do the best of everything: You’re trying to do something remarkable of a smaller segment of the solution space.”
No matter how great the Rage looks, or how visceral its gameplay is, you can’t please everyone. Many of the fans of id Studios previous releases were hoping for a free-roaming romp like that found in the majority of the company’s PC and console releases. While these gaming contents will be sated by a PC version of Rage slated for release next year, the gorgeous rail-guided gameplay of the game’s iOS version will have to hold them over for the time being. Carmack, admitting that current iteration of the game simply can’t be everything to everyone, still feels confident that no matter what gamers had been wanting or expecting from a project he was attached to, they’re going to dig what Rage for iOS has to offer.
“There is a subset of people that just hate this game the way that it is because it’s not what they wished a developer would provide for them. But the game is unquestionably fun."
Rage is available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad at a cost of $0.99 for standard definitio, and $1.99 version for the HD, iPad edition.
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