I spent some time this morning talking with Tom Mustaine of Escalation Studios and John Carmack of id Software regarding today's release of "DOOM Resurrection" on the iPhone. Unlike previous "DOOM" games, "Resurrection" takes control of the player's movements, leading you about the environment almost like an arcade light-gun game. Originally this style of gameplay was implimented simply because id wasn't sure if they could pull off a standard FPS on the iPhone. Carmack explains:
"At the beginning [of development] it wasn't clear that traditional first person shooter controls worked. None of the demo games that people had made were any good at all from an FPS standpoint. So we thought we'd look at the platform from scratch and say 'What type of gameplay would work here?' regardless of what we had done in the past."
In the middle of the development from "DOOM: Resurrection," Carmack went off and worked on "Wolfenstein 3D Classic," which provided a rather excellent FPS control scheme on the iPhone.
"That might've influenced our decision if that had happened earlier, but we do think the gameplay style in 'DOOM Resurrection' fits a different niche. We wanted to provide something that really did give this great feedback, it looks great, it has interesting stuff going on, without having to teach the player how to get around."
The game had to go through several passes before the gameplay was working, though:
""We sorta made a mistake at the beginning. We thought that you'd just be flying around and tapping on the screen, shooting the monsters. We went through half the project and it never clicked. It looked great, the technology was really solid, but it was the type of thing where nobody really had that much fun playing the game. We were very close to killing the project."
Developers at Escalation came up with an alternative, though. In the final version, players control the aiming with the iPhone's accelerometer, thus mimicking the feel of aiming with a mouse. It worked...the gameplay became much more fun and "DOOM Resurrection" was allowed to proceed. The end result is a quick arcade-style action game that's designed for pick-up-and-play gameplay. Mustaine describes it as "a distilled experience."
While Carmack seems very happy with the end product of DOOM Resurrection, the scope for iPhone gaming can only get bigger: "If they said 'Make the best iPhone game possible within your capabilities,' it would be a 5 million dollar development budget. For the 3GS it would be something like 7 million."
Somehow I doubt they'd sell that one for a buck on the AppStore.
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