Oh god, it could be Zelda. But I can't get my hopes up, not yet. The wait since Twilight Princess has been agonizing. I'd take a name and single screenshot. Just let me see something.
On an aside, is it possible to watch the E3 2004 Zelda unveiling and not smile like an idiot? I say no, it is not.
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Brainiac 8Don't call me Shirley...Registered Userregular
Off topic, but did you see Craig McCracken's final episode of the Powerpuff Girls a couple months ago? Made five years after the actual series ended? Search for "The Powerpuff Girls Rule." It's on the PPG complete series DVD set, and is fantastic and screamingly funny. A must-watch. It inspired me to make that evil monkey my avatar, especially after he gloriously butchered one of my childhood memories from the 80s.
Edit: Oh hey, it's on YouTube. WATCH IT.
I can't watch Youtube at work, so I'll check it out tonight when I get home. PPG cartoons are always awesome, and Mojo Jojo is one of the best villians created ever...up there with Lex Luthor and Brainiac.
Oh god, it could be Zelda. But I can't get my hopes up, not yet. The wait since Twilight Princess has been agonizing. I'd take a name and single screenshot. Just let me see something.
On an aside, is it possible to watch the E3 2004 Zelda unveiling and not smile like an idiot? I say no, it is not.
We'll see tomorrow, since that is Ninendo's keynote address. I can't wait to see what they say, and will be watching the live blog from work.
Brainiac 8: he's one of your favorite villians? Oh man, you're in for a hell of a show then. For the love of god don't seek out any spoilers before you watch. I'm still chuckling over it.
And it's almost guaranteed we're getting a new Zelda, since that crazy patent thing Nintendo received a few months back for a camera hint/self-play system describe Zelda's gameplay to a T. Who knows if it'll be revealed though, since Nintendo is keeping its cards close to its chest. (Now more than ever, since Excite Bots came out of nowhere.)
On an aside, is it possible to watch the E3 2004 Zelda unveiling and not smile like an idiot? I say no, it is not.
Oh yeah, I smiled like an idiot. If by 'smiled' you mean 'vomited vomiting vomit and drowned in a sea of recursive stomach juices', and by 'idiot' you mean 'furious homicidal maniac eager to impale Miyamoto on the Master Sword'.
But let's watch the blood pressure, keep those traumas repressed and simply say that with regards to Zelda, I went black and can and will never go back. (and by 'black' I mean 'Wind Waker-like')
Rehab: It's still better than CAD. Then again most webcomics are. Except possibly Shredded Moose. *shudder* Still trying to wipe that one from my brain. (You probably shouldn't search for that one at work.)
I was about to say, saying another webcomic is better than CAD is like saying that the way X company has recreated an old franchise is even better than Bomberman: Act Zero. Its almost just a given.
Also, Lego Robot is probably the most worthwhile comic for me after Penny Arcade.
The PC Gaming Alliance presented a report, or, if you will, an overview of the PC gaming market, highlighting the platform's annual revenue of approximately $11 billion. “The biggest story in PC games
is the expansion beyond retail,” said Randy Stude, president of PCGA. “PC games have successfully pioneered online subscription and distribution models that have resulted in a global boom that shows no signs of slowing. Despite the advances of the likes of Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, the online platform that remains the most accessible and robust worldwide is the PC.”
According to the report, 2008 marked the growth of online digital distribution through services such as Steam, the growth of free games with a virtual item model and the increased presence of game cards at major retailers like 7-Eleven.
MMOGs were, of course, singled out as chief products for both revenue and profits. Several Asian MMOGs are making over $100 million in annual revenue after 5+ years on the market. Blizzard Entertainment's WoW producing over $1 billion in annual revenue. Two more examples were given for 2008 - namely subscription MMOGs Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, both of which sold over 1 million units at retail.
How Many Games I Sell, Part Two
The first part of this column, in which I gave the full sales figures for one of my games, Geneforge 4: Rebellion, attracted a fair amount of attention on the Internets. This pleased me. I really want this blog to be a useful discussion point for people interested in Indie computer gaming, and I'm off to an acceptable start. I'm not really doing this for sales. And, if anyone is curious, I only sold three or four more copies of Geneforge 4 last week than I probably would have otherwise. But that's all right, because it's not why I made this blog.
So, on to some more information and conclusions about the previous post.
Platform Sales Breakdown
We release all of our games for Macintosh first and then port them to Windows. The Windows version almost always comes out about three months later.
So far, the Windows/Mac sales of Geneforge 4 break down to about 55/45. Before that, it was about 60/40. Now it's about 50/50. Macintosh market share went way up over the last couple years, and this has helped our sales a lot.
Releasing games for two platforms has always been the key to our profitability. Porting games is free money, and it's awesome. I suppose this is the sort of thing we should keep secret, as it'll only get us more competition on the Macintosh. But, on the other hand, more games makes the Macintosh more viable as a gaming platform and thus attracts more potential customers for me. So I don't worry about it. Write Mac games! Please!
Was Geneforge 4: Rebellion a Success?
Picking Geneforge 4 as the game I released sales figures for was the right choice, as it really was in the middle in terms of sales for us. However, it created a false impression of how Spiderweb Software is doing. This business is more profitable than it seemed from looking at that one case.
Geneforge 4 cost about $120K and has made about $117K. Given current sales rates, it should be in the black in at most 2-3 months. After that, everything it earns is pure, tasty profit. And we will sell it in bundles (we sell a Geneforge 4-5 bundle already, and a Geneforge 1-5 CD is coming), making more money. So I don't regret the time spent writing it at all.
And it gets better. What was my reward for the year spent writing Geneforge 4? It wasn't just the cash. I also own the game! That means, in ten years or so, I can return to it, give it better graphics and interface, add a bonus 2-3 dungeons, and release it to a new generation of gamers. I've done it before, with my games Exile 1-3, Blades of Exile, and Nethergate, and the resulting products, since I didn't need to write them from scratch, were immensely profitable.
Don't underestimate the value of owning your own intellectual property.
Can This Success Be Replicated By Others?
Yes. But it is difficult.
I had two advantages with Geneforge 4. First, I already had a large and loyal fan base. New developers don't have that. Every game I write attracts a sizable new batch of fans, but the existing base is what makes much of our money.
Second, I was writing for a market, fans of single-player RPGs, that is painfully underserved. When you write your Indie game, you have to write a very good game, so good that it'll get the customer to pry the credit card out of the wallet. But, just as importantly, you have to write something that they can't get easier and cheaper elsewhere.
There are very few single-player RPGs these days, so I have a good market. But if you're writing another Bejeweled clone, even a really good one, you got your work cut out for you.
There is totally room for new developers to build a business. But you have to be good, and you have to be unique.
Is $28 a Good Price?
I think so.
A lot of people have commented that I should lower the game's price to $10. The idea that this would increase my profits is, I feel, purest nonsense. Bearing in mind that the percentage cost of credit card processing increases as the price goes down, and, to make the same profits from Geneforge 4, I would have had to triple my sales. Triple! As in, go from a conversation rate of about 1.5% to almost 5%. This is just not realistic.
Or, to put it another way, Geneforge 4 was the game where we raised our prices to $28. Our sales did not go down from Geneforge 3 (which was $25). They went up. A lot. And Avernum 5 ($28) sold a lot more than Avernum 4 ($25).
The Indie games market seems, pricewise, to be on a full speed race to the bottom. I will deal with this in more depth in a later post, but take this one thing away: I charge a fair price. I write big, good games (with 30-40 hours of gameplay, easy), and they easily provide enough fun to more than justify the $28. I will not be shamed into charging less, not when my dollars and cents bottom line is telling me that it's working.
Do Geneforge 4's Graphics Suck?
Yes.
Does It Matter?
No.
Look, graphics are expensive. Really expensive. We keep our costs low, and our games thus become profitable quickly. We've had some games that did worse than others, but I've never, in fifteen years, written a game that lost money.
And here's the sad truth. Suppose I spent a bunch of money, busted my hump, and wrote a game with graphics as good as, say, Eschalon. Then people who really care about graphics wouldn't look at my game and go, "Wow! He's really doing good now!" They'd go, "His graphics suck. They haven't improved at all." And then they'd go play Fallout 3.
Don't get me wrong. My next game, Avernum 6, will look much nicer than Geneforge 5. I've been working really hard on it, and there are a lot of improvements there. And the next game after that, which will have an all-new engine, will look even better. And you know something? Everyone will still say they look like crap. Big budget games will ALWAYS look better. I can't compete there, there's no hope, so I don't try very hard.
And, once again, I make good money overall. So who knows? Maybe I'm onto something. After all, I'm more profitable than Electronic Arts right now.
In Closing
Thanks everyone for the comments, kind and otherwise. I hope all of this was interesting and helpful. I plan to keep plugging away on this stuff on at least a weekly basis, hopefully in shorter posts.
Keep watching the skies, and support your local Indie.
Three seasoned iPhone developers shared the secrets of their success with other would-be indie developers eying the iPhone as an indie platform. The catch? There are no secrets.
Adam Saltsman, creator of Wurdle, and the duo behind Fieldrunners — Sergei Gourski and Jamie Goch — each took a little time to share how their respective games were born, grew up and conquered the iPhone App Store. Then they took a stab at explaining just how it happened.
To hear them tell it, it's like an accident. Saltsman said his friend was screwing around over some weekends and convinced him to slap a layer of bright, colorful art on it inspired by a board game his parents wouldn't buy for him; Gourski and Goch just happened to like tower defense games and thought to make one that they liked.
But from their experiences, these guys have gained a key insight: "I think quality is largely irrelevant," said Saltsman, whose newest iPhone game is about popping zits. "I think the defining thing is how quickly you can describe your product to someone else."
The example they used was Galcon versus Mood Touch. Mood Touch is "a crappy mood ring for your iPhone. There, I'm done, that's it," said Saltsman. Galcon, on the other hand, took him 15 seconds to describe as essentially an in-depth, one-on-one real time strategy game. It's obvious which one had the better quality — but Mood Touch made the top 10 in the App Store while Galcon didn't even break into the top 100 (that Saltsman knew of).
This is the "five second rule" that's common in any creative industry: if you can't explain the idea in five seconds, you can't sell it — especially when there are like 6,000 other games that a user could buy that they can understand from the description.
Sounds like common sense, but I think what would-be indie developers on the iPhone lack is the common sense born of a perspective from within the industry. Tons of people in the audience had never developed a game before, but nearly everyone held up a hand when asked if they had one in development.
For this audience, Saltsman, Gourski and Goch are more than just pioneers — they're teachers, sent to teach what sounds like stuff you should already know (always do your paperwork, get an accountant to file the taxes properly, get used to Apple being totally hands-off, promote your game, actually finish your game before promoting it, etc.), but maybe you were too caught up in the frenzy of the iPhone to really think about.
"You don't realize how hard and complicated the entire process becomes," Gourski said, "until after you've released it. Be prepared."
Thanks for part 2! That's kind of the philosophy I'm going with my XNA game development: I could spend a ton of time, effort, and money trying to get good graphics or even passable graphics, but I'm guessing that give my lack of art skills & lack of money, I'm not going to get very far. Or I could do what I'm planning and just make text-based games. I figure people are going to look better on text based games than they are on games with bad graphics plus it drastically decreases my work load giving me more time to focus on what really matters: gameplay & story.
Yep. Like I said, the iPhone's Mount Everest of shovelware makes the Wii's pile look like a pitcher's mound. You can make a decent amount of cash for some piece of crap sold for $.99, so loads of developers have stopped trying anymore. Number one seller for a month and a half: a fart button.
Supposedly Apple's making a "premium" section of the app store reserved for better and pricier software. We'll see how that works.
The iPhone is a slick looking machine. More and more developers are starting to make iPhone games, and the platform could give the PSP and the DS a run for its money.
But, according to insiders, the phone itself might be developer friendly, but Apple is not. Apple is forcing a rather nasty contractual amendment to developers.
Under the amendment, there's a new contract provision of a 90 day refund policy that states for every refund, developers must pay back Apple's 30 percent royalty cut. What does that mean? That means Apple reimburses 100% of the cost of the refund to the user and the developer has to pay back Apple's cut with their own pocket money. Thus, Apple is not losing anything, but the developer who only receives 70 percent of the revenue from each download has to pay back 100 percent for every single refund.
If customers can claim refunds hassle-free (and there is a 90 day refund window) this means developers could actually face the prospect of going into debt as people download and play the game to completion and then claim a refund for whatever reason. Obviously good for consumers but not for developers.
Word has it that Apple is forcing devs to sign the new contract by the end of this week. Those who don't will be left with no ability to upload and upgrade existing applications. This contract is apparently being put in front of major game developers who are releasing iPhone titles.
I had been frustrated for over a year with the fact that we didn't have any iPhone development projects going internally at Id. I love my iPhone, and I think the App Store is an extremely important model for the software business. Unfortunately, things have conspired against us being out early on the platform.
Robert Duffy and I spent a week early on starting to bring up the Orcs & Elves DS codebase on the iPhone, which would have been a nice project for a launch title, but it wasn't going to be a slam dunk. The iPhone graphics hardware is a more capable superset of the DS hardware (the driver overhead is far, far worse, though), but the codebase was fairly DS specific, with lots of Nintendo API calls all over the place. I got the basics drawing by converting things to OpenGL ES, but I was still on the fence as to whether the best approach to get all the picky little special effects working would be a complete GL conversion, or a DS graphics library emulation layer. Coupled with the fact that the entire user interface would need to be re-thought and re-tested, it was clear that the project would take several months of development time, and need artists and designers as well as coding work. I made the pitch that this would still be a good plan, but the idMobile team was already committed to the Wolfenstein RPG project for conventional Java and BREW mobile phones, and Anna didn't want to slip a scheduled milestone on the established, successful development directions there for a speculative iPhone project.
After thinking about the platform's capabilities a bit more, I had a plan for an aggressive, iPhone specific project that we actually started putting some internal resources on, but the programmer tasked with it didn't work out and was let go. In an odd coincidence, an outside development team came to us with a proposal for a similar project on the Wii, and we decided to have them work on the iPhone project with us instead. We should be announcing this project soon, and it is cool. It is also late, but that's software development...
Late last year, the mobile team had finished up all the planned versions of Wolfenstein RPG, but EA had suggested that in addition to the hundreds of customized versions they normally produce for all the various mobile phones, they were interested in having another team do a significant media quality improvement on it for the iPhone. While Wolf RPG is a very finely crafted product for traditional cell phones, it wasn't designed for the iPhone's interface or capabilities, so it wouldn't be an ideal project, but it should still be worth doing. When we got the first build to test, I was pleased with how the high res artwork looked, but I was appalled at how slow it ran. It felt like one of the mid range java versions, not better than the high end BREW as I expected. I started to get a sinking feeling. I searched around in the level for a view that would confirm my suspicion, and when I found a clear enough view of some angled geometry I saw the tell-tale mid-polygon affine swim in the texture as I rotated. They were using the software rasterizer on the iPhone. I patted myself on the back a bit for the fact that the combination of my updated mobile renderer, the intelligent level design / restricted movement, and the hi-res artwork made the software renderer almost visually indistinguishable from a hardware renderer, but I was very unhappy about the implementation.
I told EA that we were NOT going to ship that as the first Id Software product on the iPhone. Using the iPhone's hardware 3D acceleration was a requirement, and it should be easy -- when I did the second generation mobile renderer (written originally in java) it was layered on top of a class I named TinyGL that did the transform / clip / rasterize operations fairly close to OpenGL semantics, but in fixed point and with both horizontal and vertical rasterization options for perspective correction. The developers came back and said it would take two months and exceed their budget.
Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself. Cass Everitt had been doing some personal work on the iPhone, so he helped me get everything set up for local iPhone development here, which is a lot more tortuous than you would expect from an Apple product. As usual, my off the cuff estimate of "Two days!" was optimistic, but I did get it done in four, and the game is definitely more pleasant at 8x the frame rate.
And I had fun doing it.
Since we now were doing something resembling "real work" on the iPhone at the office, we kept it going at a low priority. One of the projects Cass was tinkering around with at home was a port of Quake 3, and we talked about different interface strategies every now and then.
Unfortunately, when we sat down to try a few things out, we found that Q3 wasn't really running fast enough to make good judgments on iPhone control systems. The hardware should be capable enough, but it will take some architectural changes to the rendering code to get the most out of it.
I was just starting to set up a framework to significantly revise Q3 when I considered the possibility of just going to an earlier codebase to experiment with initially. If we wanted to factor performance out of the equation, we could go all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D, the grandfather of FPS games. It had the basic run and gun play that has been built on for fifteen years, but it originally ran on 286 computers, so it should be pretty trivial to hold a good framerate on the iPhone.
Wolfenstein was originally written in Borland C and TASM for DOS, but I had open sourced the code long ago, and there were several projects that had updated the original code to work on OpenGL and modern operating systems. After a little looking around, I found Wolf3D Redux at http://wolf3dredux.sourceforge.net/. One of the development comments about "removal of the gangrenous 16 bit code" made me smile.
It was nice and simple to download, extract data from a commercial copy of Wolfenstein, and start playing on a PC at high resolution. Things weren't as smooth as they should be at first, but two little changes made a huge difference -- going at VBL synced update rates with one tic per cycle instead of counting milliseconds to match 70 hz game tics, and fixing a bug with premature integralization in the angle update code that caused mouse movement to be notchier than it should be. The game was still fun to play after all these years, and I began to think that it might be worthwhile to actually make a product out of Wolfenstein on the iPhone, rather than just using it as a testbed, assuming the controls worked out as fun to play. The simple episodic nature of the game would make it easy to split up into a $0.99 version with just the first episode, a more expensive version with all sixty levels, and we could release Spear of Destiny if there was additional demand. I was getting a little ahead of myself without a fun-to-play demonstration of feasibility on the iPhone, but the idea of moving the entire line of classic Id titles over -- Wolf, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, and Quake Arena, was starting to sound like a real good idea.
I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things. I thought about it a bit, and decided that I would go ahead and do the project myself. The "big projects" at Id are always top priority, but the systems programming work in Rage is largely completed, and the team hasn't been gated on me for anything in a while. There is going to be memory and framerate optimization work going on until it ships, but I decided that I could spend a couple weeks away from Rage to work on the iPhone exclusively. Cass continued to help with iPhone system issues, I drafted Eric Will to create the few new art assets, and Christian Antkow did the audio work, but this was the first time I had taken full responsibility for an entire product in a very long time.
*Design notes*
The big question was how "classic" should we leave the game? I have bought various incarnations of Super Mario Bros on at least four Nintendo platforms, so I think there is something to be said for the classics, but there were so many options for improvement. The walls and sprites in the game were originally all 64 x 64 x 8 bit color, and the sound effects were either 8khz / 8 bit mono or (sometimes truly awful) FM synth sounds. Changing these would be trivial from a coding standpoint. In the end, I decided to leave the game media pretty much unchanged, but tweak the game play a little bit, and build a new user framework around the core play experience. This decision was made a lot easier by the fact that we were right around the 10 meg over-the-air app download limit with the converted media. This would probably be the only Id project to ever be within hailing distance of that mark, so we should try to fit it in.
The original in-game status bar display had to go, because the user's thumbs were expected to cover much of that area. We could have gone with just floating stats, but I thought that BJ's face added a lot of personality to the game, so I wanted to leave that in the middle of the screen. Unfortunately, the way the weapon graphics were drawn, especially the knife, caused issues if they were just drawn above the existing face graphics. I had a wider background created for the face, and used the extra space for directional damage indicators, which was a nice improvement in the gameplay. It was a tough decision to stop there on damage feedback, because a lot of little things with view roll kicks, shaped screen blends, and even double vision or blurring effects, are all pretty easy to add and quite effective, but getting farther away from "classic".
I started out with an explicit "open door" button like the original game, but I quickly decided to just make that automatic. Wolf and Doom had explicit "use" buttons, but we did away with them on Quake with contact or proximity activation on everything. Modern games have generally brought explicit activation back by situationally overriding attack, but hunting for push walls in Wolf by shooting every tile wouldn't work out. There were some combat tactics involving explicitly shutting doors that are gone with automatic-use, and some secret push walls are trivially found when you pick up an item in front of them now, but this was definitely the right decision.
You could switch weapons in Wolf, but almost nobody actually did, except for occasionally conserving ammo with the chain gun, or challenges like "beat the game with only the knife". That functionality didn't justify the interface clutter.
The concept of "lives" was still in wolf, with 1-ups and extras at certain scores. We ditched that in Doom, which was actually sort of innovative at the time, since action games on computers and consoles were still very much take-the-quarter arcade oriented. I miss the concept of "score" in a lot of games today, but I think the finite and granular nature of the enemies, tasks, and items in Wolf is better suited to end-of-level stats, so I removed both lives and score, but added persistent awards for par time, 100% kills, 100% secrets, and 100% treasures. The award alone wasn't enough incentive to make treasures relevant, so I turned them into uncapped +1 health crumbs, which makes you always happy to find them.
I increased the pickup radius for items, which avoided the mild frustration of having to sometimes make a couple passes at an item when you are cleaning up a room full of stuff.
I doubled the starting ammo on a fresh level start. If a player just got killed, it isn't good to frustrate them even more with a severe ammo conservation constraint. There was some debate about the right way to handle death: respawn with the level as is (good in that you can keep making progress if you just get one more shot off each time, bad in that weapon pickups are no longer available), respawn just as you entered the level (good -- keep your machinegun / chaingun, bad -- you might have 1 health), or, what I chose, restart the map with basic stats just as if you had started the map from the menu.
There are 60 levels in the original Wolf dataset, and I wanted people to have the freedom to easily jump around between different levels and skills, so there is no enforcement of starting at the beginning. The challenge is to /complete /a level, not /get to/ a level. It is fun to start filling in the grid of level completions and awards, and it often feels better to try a different level after a death. The only exception to the start-anywhere option is that you must find the entrance to the secret levels before you can start a new game there.
In watching the early testers, the biggest issue I saw was people sliding off doors before they opened, and having to maneuver back around to go through. In Wolf, as far as collision detection was concerned, everything was just a 64x64 tile map that was either solid or passable.
Doors changed the tile state when they completed opening or began closing. There was discussion about magnetizing the view angle towards doors, or somehow beveling the areas around the doors, but it turned out to be pretty easy to make the door tiles only have a solid central core against the player, so players would slide into the "notch" with the door until it opened. This made a huge improvement in playability.
There is definitely something to be said for a game that loads in a few seconds, with automatic save of your position when you exit. I did a lot of testing by playing the game, exiting to take notes in the iPhone notepad, then restarting Wolf to resume playing. Not having to skip through animated logos at the start is nice. We got this pretty much by accident with the very small and simple nature of Wolf, but I think it is worth specifically optimizing for in future titles.
The original point of this project was to investigate FPS control schemes for the iPhone, and a lot of testing was done with different schemes and parameters. I was sort of hoping that there would be one "obviously correct" way to control it, but it doesn't turn out to be the case.
For a casual first time player, it is clearly best to have a single forward / back / turn control stick and a fire button.
Tilt control is confusing for first exposure to the game, but I think it does add to the fun factor when you use it. I like the tilt-to-move option, but people that play a lot of driving games on the iPhone seem to like tilt-to-turn, where you are sort of driving BJ through the levels. Tilt needs a decent deadband, and a little bit of filtering is good. I was surprised that the precision on the accelerometer was only a couple degrees, which makes it poorly suited for any direct mapped usage, but it works well enough as a relative speed control.
Serious console gamers tend to take to the "dual stick" control modes easily for movement, but the placement of the fire button is problematic. Using an index finger to fire is effective but uncomfortable. I see many players just move the thumb to fire, using strafe movement for fine tuning aim. It is almost tempting to try to hijack the side volume switch for fire, but the ergonomics aren't quite right, and it would be very un-Apple-like, and wouldn't be available on the iPod touch (plus I couldn't figure out how...).
We tried a tilt-forward to fire to allow you to keep your thumbs on the dual control sticks, but it didn't work out very well. Forward / back tilt has the inherent variable holding angle problem for anything, and a binary transition point is hard for people to hold without continuous feedback. Better visual feedback on the current angle and trip point would help, but we didn't pursue it much. For a game with just, say, a rocket launcher, shake/shove-to-fire might be interesting, but it isn't any good for wolf.
It was critical for the control sticks to be analog, since digital direction pads have proven quite ineffective on touch screens due to progressive lack of registration during play. With an analog stick, the player has continuous visual feedback of the stick position in most cases, so they can self correct. Tuning the deadband and slide off behavior are important.
Level design criteria has advanced a lot since Wolfenstein, but I wasn't going to open up the option of us modifying the levels, even though the start of the first level is painfully bad for a first time player, with the tiny, symmetric rooms for them to get their nose mashed into walls and turned around in. The idea is that you started the game in a prison cell after bashing your guard over the head, but even with the exact same game tools, we would lead the player through the experience much better now. Some of the levels are still great fun to play, and it is interesting to read Tom Hall and John Romero's designer notes in the old hint manuals, but the truth is that some levels were scrubbed out in only a couple hours, unlike the long process of testing and adjustment that goes on today.
It was only after I thought I was basically done with the game that Tim Willits pointed out the elephant in the gameplay room -- for 95% of players, wandering around lost in a maze isn't very much fun.
Implementing an automap was pretty straightforward, and it probably added more to the enjoyment of the game than anything else. Before adding this, I thought that only a truly negligible amount of people would actually finish all 60 levels, but now I think there might be enough people that get through them to justify bringing the Spear of Destiny levels over later.
When I was first thinking about the project I sort of assumed that we wouldn't bother with music, but Wolf3D Redux already had code that converted audio tracks from one of the later commercial Wolf releases and encoding at a different bitrate, but I probably wouldn't have bothered if not for tthe old id music format into ogg, so we would up with support at the beginning, and it turned out pretty good. We wound up ripping the red book he initial support. It would have been nice to re-record the music with a high quality MIDI synth, but we didn't have the original MIDI source, and Christian said that the conversion back from the id music format to midi was a little spotty, and would take a fair amount of work to get right. I emailed Bobby Prince, the original composer, to see if he had any high quality versions still around, but he didn't get back with me.
The game is definitely simplistic by modern standards, but it still has its moments. Getting the drop on a brown shirt just as he is pulling his pistol from the holster. Making an SS do the "twitchy dance" with your machine gun. Rounding a corner and unloading your weapon on ... a potted plant. Simplistic plays well on the iPhone.
*Programming notes*
Cass and I got the game running on the iPhone very quickly, but I was a little disappointed that various issues around the graphics driver, the input processing, and the process scheduling meant that doing a locked-at-60-hz game on the iPhone wasn't really possible. I hope to take these up with Apple at some point in the future, but it meant that Wolf would be a roughly two tick game. It is only "roughly" because there is no swapinterval support, and the timer scheduling has a lot of variability in it. It doesn't seem to matter all that much, the play is still smooth and fun, but I would have liked to at least contrast it with the perfect limit case.
It turns out that there were a couple issues that required work even at 30hz. For a game like Wolf, any PC that is in use today is essentially infinitely fast, and the Wolf3D Redux code did some things that were convenient but wasteful. That is often exactly the right thing to do, but the iPhone isn't quite as infinitely fast as a desktop PC.
Wolfenstein (and Doom) originally drew the characters as sparse stretched columns of solid pixels (vertical instead of horizontal for efficiency in interleaved planar mode-X VGA), but OpenGL versions need to generate a square texture with transparent pixels. Typically this is then drawn by either alpha blending or alpha testing a big quad that is mostly empty space. You could play through several early levels of Wolf without this being a problem, but in later levels there are often large fields of dozens of items that stack up to enough overdraw to max out the GPU and drop the framerate to 20 fps. The solution is to bound the solid pixels in the texture and only draw that restricted area, which solves the problem with most items, but Wolf has a few different heavily used ceiling lamp textures that have a small lamp at the top and a thin but full width shadow at the bottom. A single bounds doesn't exclude many texels, so I wound up including two bounds, which made them render many times faster.
The other problem was CPU related. Wolf3d Redux used the original ray casting scheme to find out which walls were visible, then called a routine to draw each wall tile with OpenGL calls. The code looked something like this:
DrawWall( int wallNum ) {
char name[128];
texture_t *tex;
sprintf( name, "walls/%d.tga", wallNum );
tex = FindTexture( name );
...
}
texture_t FindTexture( const char *name ) {
int i;
for ( i = 0 ; i < numTextures ; i++ ) {
if ( !strcmp( name, texture[name]->name ) ) {
return texture[name];
}
}
...
}
I winced when I saw that at the top of the instruments profile, but again, you could play all the early levels that only had twenty or thirty visible tiles at a time without it actually being a problem.
However, some later levels with huge open areas could have over a hundred visible tiles, and that led to 20hz again. The solution was a trivial change to something resembling:
Wolf3D Redux included a utility that extracted the variously packed media from the original games and turned them into cleaner files with modern formats. Unfortunately, an attempt at increasing the quality of the original art assets by using hq2x graphics scaling to turn the 64x64 art into better filtered 128x128 arts was causing lots of sprites to have fringes around them due to incorrect handling of alpha borders. It wasn't possible to fix it up at load time, so I had to do the proper outline-with-color-but-0-alpha operations in a modified version of the extractor. I also decided to do all the format conversion and mip generation there, so there was no significant CPU time spent during texture loading, helping to keep the load time down. I experimented with the PVRTC formats, but while it would have been ok for the walls, unlike with DXT you can't get a lossless alpha mask out of it, so it wouldn't have worked for the sprites. Besides, you really don't want to mess with the carefully chosen pixels in a 64x64 block very much when you scale it larger than the screen on occasion.
I also had to make one last minute hack change to the original media -- the Red Cross organization had asserted their trademark rights over red crosses (sigh) some time after we released the original Wolfenstein 3D game, and all new game releases must not use red crosses on white backgrounds as health symbols. One single, solitary sprite graphic got modified for this release.
User interface code was the first thing I started making other programmers do at Id when I no longer had to write every line of code in a project, because I usually find it tedious and unrewarding. This was such a small project that I went ahead and did it myself, and I learned an interesting little thing. Traditionally, UI code has separate drawing and input processing code, but on a touchscreen device, it often works well to do a combined "immediate mode interface", with code like this:
if ( DrawPicWithTouch( x, y, w, h, name ) ) {
menuState = newState;
}
Doing that for the floating user gameplay input controls would introduce a frame of response latency, but for menus and such, it works very well.
One of the worst moments during the development was when I was getting ready to hook up the automatic savegame on app exit. There wasn't any savegame code. I went back and grabbed the original 16 bit dos code for load / save game, but when I compiled I found out that the Wolf3d Redux codebase had changed a lot more than just the near / far pointer issues, asm code, and comment blocks. The changes were sensible things, like grouping more variables into structures and defining enums for more things, but it did mean that I wasn't dealing with the commercially tested core that I thought I was. It also meant that I was a lot more concerned about a strange enemy lerping through the world bug I had seen a couple times.
I seriously considered going back to the virgin codebase and reimplementing the OpenGL rendering from scratch. The other thing that bothered me about the Redux codebase was that it was basically a graft of the Wolf3D code into the middle of a gutted Quake 2 codebase. This was cool in some ways, because it gave us a console, cvars, and the system / OpenGL portable framework, and it was clear the original intention was to move towards multiplayer functionality, but it was a lot of bloat. The original wolf code was only a few dozen C files, while the framework around it here was several times that.
Looking through the original code brought back some memories. I stopped signing code files years ago, but the top of WL_MAIN.C made me smile:
It wasn't dated, but that would have been in 1991.
In the end, I decided to stick with the Redux codebase, but I got a lot more free with hacking big chunks of it out. I reimplemented load / save game (fixing the inevitable pointer bugs involved), and by littering asserts throughout the code, I tracked the other problem down to an issue with making a signed comparison against one of the new enum types that compare as unsigned. I'm still not positive if this was the right call, since the codebase is sort of a mess with lots of vestigial code that doesn't really do anything, and I don't have time to clean it all up right now.
Of course, someone else is welcome to do that. The full source code for the commercial app is available on the web site. There was a little thought given to the fact that if I had reverted to the virgin source, the project wouldn't be required to be under the GPL. Wolf and the app store presents a sort of unique situation -- a user can't just compile the code and choose not to pay for the app, because most users aren't registered developers, and the data isn't readily available, but there is actually some level of commercial risk in the fast-moving iPhone development community. It will not be hard to take the code that is already fun to play, pull a bunch of fun things off the net out of various projects people have done with the code over the years, dust off some old map editors, and load up with some modern quality art and sound.
Everyone is perfectly within their rights to go do that, and they can aggressively try to bury the original game if they want. However, I think there is actually a pretty good opportunity for cooperation. If anyone makes a quality product and links to the original Wolf app, we can start having links to "wolf derived" or "wolf related" projects.
That should turn out to be a win for everyone.
I'm going back to Rage for a while, but I do expect Classic Doom to come fairly soon for the iPhone.
Well the iPhone makes me finally empathize with all the people that go around crying that the Wii will destroy gaming.
I'll take the bait.
Why is it that different? I don't think the Wii is going to destroy gaming just because it's popularized gaming for the mainstream. For that same reason, I don't think the iPhone is the same way. After all, the thing just got started!
I think the biggest problem does have to do with the mountain of games on the system (how to tell the gems from the crap), but that can be solved by improving the browsing interface of the app store, and adding things like ratings/reviews. That's not a difficult thing to do, since numerous marketplaces (like Amazon) do this. I'm pretty confident that we'll start seeing that model come to other app stores (and for that matter, Xbox LIVE Marketplace, PSN, WiiWare, etc.).
Is this going to work in attracting casuals? I have my doubts not, even though I think motion control is inevitable at some point for the 360 and PS3, I just think its going to require first party support, 3rd party peripherals don't usually work out that well.
Well the iPhone makes me finally empathize with all the people that go around crying that the Wii will destroy gaming.
I'll take the bait.
Why is it that different? I don't think the Wii is going to destroy gaming just because it's popularized gaming for the mainstream. For that same reason, I don't think the iPhone is the same way. After all, the thing just got started!
I think the biggest problem does have to do with the mountain of games on the system (how to tell the gems from the crap), but that can be solved by improving the browsing interface of the app store, and adding things like ratings/reviews. That's not a difficult thing to do, since numerous marketplaces (like Amazon) do this. I'm pretty confident that we'll start seeing that model come to other app stores (and for that matter, Xbox LIVE Marketplace, PSN, WiiWare, etc.).
Well honestly if you look at the rankings and the user ratings on the App store most of the best Apps are listed there. So there is the survival of the fittest method of keeping the crap under control. As for the refund policy, think this has come into light after that guy made like $8000 on selling a picture as a $1000 App.
Is this going to work in attracting casuals? I have my doubts not, even though I think motion control is inevitable at some point for the 360 and PS3, I just think its going to require first party support, 3rd party peripherals don't usually work out that well.
It's a third party periph with a cheesy minigame compilation pack-in.
The mass market has already made up its mind and stuff like this isn't going to change anything in terms of "attracting casual audience" or whatever.
I'd honestly be surprised if this thing got any support outside of the "Squeeballs" pack-in it comes with, and maybe one or two other token titles from the same company.
As is the case with most third party peripherals, this thing will likely fade quickly into obscurity and be forgotten. Oh wait it has to be known before it can be forgotten. It will fade quickly from obscurity into oblivion.
At the GamesBeat 2009 Games Conference in San Francisco today, games industry analysts Michael Pachter (Wedbush Morgan), Colin Sebastian (Lazard Capital Markets), and David Cole (DFC Intelligence) delivered their thoughts on the next 10 years of the games industry. Most interesting are the analysts' predictions for the next console generation -- or lack thereof.
"I think we've seen the last generation of consoles," Pachter claims. He says Nintendo will likely upgrade the Wii at some point (perhaps with HD and more storage), but all three console makers will be reluctant to release any subsequent consoles -- in the future it'll be more about a standard delivery platfrom. Why? Because there's no money in it for them. And because the third party publishers simply won't allow it. "[Third party publishers] are not going to support a PS4 or Xbox 720," he says, pointing to the fact that they're already largely struggling with the cost of developing games today. "The content is not going to change in any meaningful ways because the publishers can't afford it," he continues, suggesting that the current crop of consoles will be the ones to last us well into the future.
Sebastian disagrees, instead saying the game's industry will have one more console generation, which will hit in 2012. Cole agrees with him, saying that in 2012 the PS3 will be the leading platform for software sales and that both Microsoft and Nintendo will be forced to launch new platforms (Sony would likely wait a bit longer).
Patcher at least agrees that we wouldn't see another Sony platform for quite some time. "Sony is not going to put out a console until they make a profit on this generation, and my math puts that at around 2015."
Can't say that I really see Microsoft or Nintendo needing to launch a new system for awhile but I think its safe to say that there will probably be multiple console generations to come.
Is this going to work in attracting casuals? I have my doubts not, even though I think motion control is inevitable at some point for the 360 and PS3, I just think its going to require first party support, 3rd party peripherals don't usually work out that well.
It's a third party periph with a cheesy minigame compilation pack-in.
The mass market has already made up its mind and stuff like this isn't going to change anything in terms of "attracting casual audience" or whatever.
I'd honestly be surprised if this thing got any support outside of the "Squeeballs" pack-in it comes with, and maybe one or two other token titles from the same company.
As is the case with most third party peripherals, this thing will likely fade quickly into obscurity and be forgotten. Oh wait it has to be known before it can be forgotten. It will fade quickly from obscurity into oblivion.
Agreed. There have been motion control peripherals for games before the Wii, yet they always seemed to be relegated to mall island kiosks with crappy games as demos. What you have to do is follow it up with games and Nintendo has a strong enough first party development team to do this.
A major reason that the Wii and its motion controller are so successful is because the Wii and that approachable, intuitive, motion controlled interface are synonymous.
It takes more than a mere controller, good though it may be, and a single cartoony minigame compilation to pull that off; especially for consoles that have firm market mindshare as traditional consoles.
That Gametrak Freedom peripheral is probably going to be too little too late in terms of making a real significant impact. It will probably make for some entertaining games on PSN/Live Arcade but I can't really see it getting used for a lot of full blow games from developers. Undoubtedly, some will attempt it to make use of it and see a decent amount of success but it will probably be largely ignored otherwise.
We could actually see some companies attempting to port/upgrade Wii games and release them on the 360 or PS3 though. That would be pretty funny.
"[Third party publishers] are not going to support a PS4 or Xbox 720," he says, pointing to the fact that they're already largely struggling with the cost of developing games today. "The content is not going to change in any meaningful ways because the publishers can't afford it," he continues, suggesting that the current crop of consoles will be the ones to last us well into the future.
There will always be a next big thing whether it be new technology that simply make shit easier like a possible physics card, simple shit like a holographic disc format, or insane shit like the wiimote. Nobody knows what might happen with the emerging markets. Sure the cycle might lengthen, but it won't die. The cycle hasn't even died with movie formats.
I predict we will be laughing in the future at how we thought games wouldn't get any more expensive for the publishers.
Cole agrees with him, saying that in 2012 the PS3 will be the leading platform for software sales and that both Microsoft and Nintendo will be forced to launch new platforms
!? o_O Do these guys live in a magical world of makebelieve?
Patcher at least agrees that we wouldn't see another Sony platform for quite some time. "Sony is not going to put out a console until they make a profit on this generation, and my math puts that at around 2015."
Why the fuck would they do that when no other console company has done that, and Sony has no reason to not do what they did and to stick around unless it magically becomes a huge success.
I'm inclined to agree with Conscous. The possible paths of development are way too varied to be certain of something like that. There will probably still be expensive games--and they will be expensive, perhaps even more so than now--but I seen no reason to see why a future Sony or Microsoft platform would suddenly just stop having third-party games. Many of them are cheaper games. Hell, just look at XBLA community games--the definition of a game with an affordable development cycle. Something similar could very well appear in the future on any console.
Cole agrees with him, saying that in 2012 the PS3 will be the leading platform for software sales and that both Microsoft and Nintendo will be forced to launch new platforms
!? o_O Do these guys live in a magical world of makebelieve?
Yeah, that's quite a leap of faith to make. Not outside the realm of possibility, but still not that likely....
My prediction for next-gen: Like this gen but different.
My prediction for next-next-gen: No fucking clue. Predicting what the world will be like in a decade or so is impossible.
Heh, I didn't even notice this at first but these two things are just a bit at odds with one another.
"I think we've seen the last generation of consoles," Pachter claims.
Patcher at least agrees that we wouldn't see another Sony platform for quite some time.
Backpedaling on his main claim within the same keynote. Hmm.
I think he's talking about 10 years from now. In other words, in 2019, the consoles will be XBox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii HD. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I could conceivably see that being the outcome. If I had to put a date on when the next generation comes out, I'd say...
*spins a wheel*
2017.
Assuming Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft haven't all been submerged thanks to the polar ice caps melting as a result of global warming, of course.
I'm inclined to believe that there is chance there won't be a next gen console.
I think the future of gaming is directly streamed to your monitor/tv gaming, the only question is whether that will happen fast enough. If it happens early enough it will preclude a next gen launch (which will be delayed anyway given the economics).
Oh, there will be definitely be more console generations.
The question is if the industry is ever going to grow the fuck up and we all standardize on one 'platform' akin to DVD. It's fucking stupid that we have to distribute 4 different versions of the game game, which is pushing 4 other, smaller games off the shelves. It's stupid that we have to stock 3 different versions of the same guitar controller because nobody can standardize on a controller interface.
Then, and only then, will the industry have truly grown and take off. For now though, it just ends up eating it's young and each other.
It was silly when we had 3 different movie formats on the market, and it's still silly with two, but at least Blu Ray players can play all DVDs. Music only has one format, people would laugh at the idea of CDs that only work on Sony players and CDs that only work on Phillips players. It's silly that the same exact game has to have 4 different versions pressed and tested.
And all of them properly died out. I used libraries as a barometer of success - and they don't even order new VHS tapes anymore. It's all DVD or CD.
All that's going to happen with the games industry from here on out is that one console will always have a gigantic lead and the 2 others will split the other half of the userbase.
There's also the fact that the Xbox is not actually that 'safe' since it could be killed by a shareholder revolt at any moment - they don't have the "pride" factor of Sony in that regard.
What happens if Sony ends up in third again? Either they pull out and they just have their developers work on the uniconsole format, or they continue to bleed money because people think competition actually means something in the games industry anymore.
Betamax lasted a long time. So did Laserdisc. The only reason DVD didn't result in a major format war was because of the Betamax/VHS war. HDDVD/Blu-ray could have lasted much longer.
There's also the fact that the Xbox is not actually that 'safe' since it could be killed by a shareholder revolt at any moment - they don't have the "pride" factor of Sony in that regard.
I doubt the shareholders care much about the 360 either way. It is making a profit right now so they have no reason to attack it.
Thing is, having multiple platforms is a much more positive aspect than a negative aspect because of the competition that it creates. Both with consoles and handhelds.
The 360 provides a platform for those who want HD gaming and a solid online experience. It also hits a nice middle of the road as far as price is concerned. The PS3 takes on a higher price at its own expense but in doing so gives people extremely impressive and powerful tech and offers users a next generation format for watching movies. The Wii offers up a new way to play games at an affordable price and gives people a venue for playing retro games that they enjoyed. So in the end you have something for everybody, whereas one format forces everyone into accepting its unified and rigid terms and conditions.
But streamed gaming solves all your problems. The competition would be the contents, i.e. games, like TV shows or movies, not the hardware. The streaming box would be the unifying console format, and the game developers can compete on the back end on their servers that does not affect the consumers at all.
Streamed gaming also solves the problem of piracy.
The question is if the industry is ever going to grow the fuck up and we all standardize on one 'platform' akin to DVD.
But movies don't work like videogames.
Even the DVD had competition. VHS had competition. Blu-Ray had competition.
There's need to be competition between the console makers; if there were no SEGA to compete with Nintendo, which eventually attracted Sony into the market, we'd probably just be getting Gamecube's by now.
Posts
On an aside, is it possible to watch the E3 2004 Zelda unveiling and not smile like an idiot? I say no, it is not.
I can't watch Youtube at work, so I'll check it out tonight when I get home. PPG cartoons are always awesome, and Mojo Jojo is one of the best villians created ever...up there with Lex Luthor and Brainiac.
We'll see tomorrow, since that is Ninendo's keynote address. I can't wait to see what they say, and will be watching the live blog from work.
Nintendo Network ID - Brainiac_8
PSN - Brainiac_8
Steam - http://steamcommunity.com/id/BRAINIAC8/
Add me!
And it's almost guaranteed we're getting a new Zelda, since that crazy patent thing Nintendo received a few months back for a camera hint/self-play system describe Zelda's gameplay to a T. Who knows if it'll be revealed though, since Nintendo is keeping its cards close to its chest. (Now more than ever, since Excite Bots came out of nowhere.)
Oh yeah, I smiled like an idiot. If by 'smiled' you mean 'vomited vomiting vomit and drowned in a sea of recursive stomach juices', and by 'idiot' you mean 'furious homicidal maniac eager to impale Miyamoto on the Master Sword'.
But let's watch the blood pressure, keep those traumas repressed and simply say that with regards to Zelda, I went black and can and will never go back. (and by 'black' I mean 'Wind Waker-like')
*Special thanks to Questionable Content
In my 3DS: Super Smash Bros, AC New Leaf
Last game completed: Steamworld Dig
And, too bring this back to involving sales talk, TP sold a lot more, as well.
If it were an item that could be sold I could only hope its sales would be as low as the Ultimate Shooter Collection.
Nintendo should be mass manufacturing the sword/shield the Miyamoto walked out with....
Also, Lego Robot is probably the most worthwhile comic for me after Penny Arcade.
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Supposedly Apple's making a "premium" section of the app store reserved for better and pricier software. We'll see how that works.
http://kotaku.com/5181471/apple-putting-the-squeeze-on-iphone-developers
Since we're talking iPhones.
Off the subject of sales, anyone read the 5000-word essay John Carmack included with Wolf3D for the iPhone? It's fascinating
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/id-releases-open-source-wolf-3d-iphone
I had been frustrated for over a year with the fact that we didn't have any iPhone development projects going internally at Id. I love my iPhone, and I think the App Store is an extremely important model for the software business. Unfortunately, things have conspired against us being out early on the platform.
Robert Duffy and I spent a week early on starting to bring up the Orcs & Elves DS codebase on the iPhone, which would have been a nice project for a launch title, but it wasn't going to be a slam dunk. The iPhone graphics hardware is a more capable superset of the DS hardware (the driver overhead is far, far worse, though), but the codebase was fairly DS specific, with lots of Nintendo API calls all over the place. I got the basics drawing by converting things to OpenGL ES, but I was still on the fence as to whether the best approach to get all the picky little special effects working would be a complete GL conversion, or a DS graphics library emulation layer. Coupled with the fact that the entire user interface would need to be re-thought and re-tested, it was clear that the project would take several months of development time, and need artists and designers as well as coding work. I made the pitch that this would still be a good plan, but the idMobile team was already committed to the Wolfenstein RPG project for conventional Java and BREW mobile phones, and Anna didn't want to slip a scheduled milestone on the established, successful development directions there for a speculative iPhone project.
After thinking about the platform's capabilities a bit more, I had a plan for an aggressive, iPhone specific project that we actually started putting some internal resources on, but the programmer tasked with it didn't work out and was let go. In an odd coincidence, an outside development team came to us with a proposal for a similar project on the Wii, and we decided to have them work on the iPhone project with us instead. We should be announcing this project soon, and it is cool. It is also late, but that's software development...
Late last year, the mobile team had finished up all the planned versions of Wolfenstein RPG, but EA had suggested that in addition to the hundreds of customized versions they normally produce for all the various mobile phones, they were interested in having another team do a significant media quality improvement on it for the iPhone. While Wolf RPG is a very finely crafted product for traditional cell phones, it wasn't designed for the iPhone's interface or capabilities, so it wouldn't be an ideal project, but it should still be worth doing. When we got the first build to test, I was pleased with how the high res artwork looked, but I was appalled at how slow it ran. It felt like one of the mid range java versions, not better than the high end BREW as I expected. I started to get a sinking feeling. I searched around in the level for a view that would confirm my suspicion, and when I found a clear enough view of some angled geometry I saw the tell-tale mid-polygon affine swim in the texture as I rotated. They were using the software rasterizer on the iPhone. I patted myself on the back a bit for the fact that the combination of my updated mobile renderer, the intelligent level design / restricted movement, and the hi-res artwork made the software renderer almost visually indistinguishable from a hardware renderer, but I was very unhappy about the implementation.
I told EA that we were NOT going to ship that as the first Id Software product on the iPhone. Using the iPhone's hardware 3D acceleration was a requirement, and it should be easy -- when I did the second generation mobile renderer (written originally in java) it was layered on top of a class I named TinyGL that did the transform / clip / rasterize operations fairly close to OpenGL semantics, but in fixed point and with both horizontal and vertical rasterization options for perspective correction. The developers came back and said it would take two months and exceed their budget.
Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself. Cass Everitt had been doing some personal work on the iPhone, so he helped me get everything set up for local iPhone development here, which is a lot more tortuous than you would expect from an Apple product. As usual, my off the cuff estimate of "Two days!" was optimistic, but I did get it done in four, and the game is definitely more pleasant at 8x the frame rate.
And I had fun doing it.
Since we now were doing something resembling "real work" on the iPhone at the office, we kept it going at a low priority. One of the projects Cass was tinkering around with at home was a port of Quake 3, and we talked about different interface strategies every now and then.
Unfortunately, when we sat down to try a few things out, we found that Q3 wasn't really running fast enough to make good judgments on iPhone control systems. The hardware should be capable enough, but it will take some architectural changes to the rendering code to get the most out of it.
I was just starting to set up a framework to significantly revise Q3 when I considered the possibility of just going to an earlier codebase to experiment with initially. If we wanted to factor performance out of the equation, we could go all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D, the grandfather of FPS games. It had the basic run and gun play that has been built on for fifteen years, but it originally ran on 286 computers, so it should be pretty trivial to hold a good framerate on the iPhone.
Wolfenstein was originally written in Borland C and TASM for DOS, but I had open sourced the code long ago, and there were several projects that had updated the original code to work on OpenGL and modern operating systems. After a little looking around, I found Wolf3D Redux at http://wolf3dredux.sourceforge.net/. One of the development comments about "removal of the gangrenous 16 bit code" made me smile.
It was nice and simple to download, extract data from a commercial copy of Wolfenstein, and start playing on a PC at high resolution. Things weren't as smooth as they should be at first, but two little changes made a huge difference -- going at VBL synced update rates with one tic per cycle instead of counting milliseconds to match 70 hz game tics, and fixing a bug with premature integralization in the angle update code that caused mouse movement to be notchier than it should be. The game was still fun to play after all these years, and I began to think that it might be worthwhile to actually make a product out of Wolfenstein on the iPhone, rather than just using it as a testbed, assuming the controls worked out as fun to play. The simple episodic nature of the game would make it easy to split up into a $0.99 version with just the first episode, a more expensive version with all sixty levels, and we could release Spear of Destiny if there was additional demand. I was getting a little ahead of myself without a fun-to-play demonstration of feasibility on the iPhone, but the idea of moving the entire line of classic Id titles over -- Wolf, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, and Quake Arena, was starting to sound like a real good idea.
I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things. I thought about it a bit, and decided that I would go ahead and do the project myself. The "big projects" at Id are always top priority, but the systems programming work in Rage is largely completed, and the team hasn't been gated on me for anything in a while. There is going to be memory and framerate optimization work going on until it ships, but I decided that I could spend a couple weeks away from Rage to work on the iPhone exclusively. Cass continued to help with iPhone system issues, I drafted Eric Will to create the few new art assets, and Christian Antkow did the audio work, but this was the first time I had taken full responsibility for an entire product in a very long time.
*Design notes*
The big question was how "classic" should we leave the game? I have bought various incarnations of Super Mario Bros on at least four Nintendo platforms, so I think there is something to be said for the classics, but there were so many options for improvement. The walls and sprites in the game were originally all 64 x 64 x 8 bit color, and the sound effects were either 8khz / 8 bit mono or (sometimes truly awful) FM synth sounds. Changing these would be trivial from a coding standpoint. In the end, I decided to leave the game media pretty much unchanged, but tweak the game play a little bit, and build a new user framework around the core play experience. This decision was made a lot easier by the fact that we were right around the 10 meg over-the-air app download limit with the converted media. This would probably be the only Id project to ever be within hailing distance of that mark, so we should try to fit it in.
The original in-game status bar display had to go, because the user's thumbs were expected to cover much of that area. We could have gone with just floating stats, but I thought that BJ's face added a lot of personality to the game, so I wanted to leave that in the middle of the screen. Unfortunately, the way the weapon graphics were drawn, especially the knife, caused issues if they were just drawn above the existing face graphics. I had a wider background created for the face, and used the extra space for directional damage indicators, which was a nice improvement in the gameplay. It was a tough decision to stop there on damage feedback, because a lot of little things with view roll kicks, shaped screen blends, and even double vision or blurring effects, are all pretty easy to add and quite effective, but getting farther away from "classic".
I started out with an explicit "open door" button like the original game, but I quickly decided to just make that automatic. Wolf and Doom had explicit "use" buttons, but we did away with them on Quake with contact or proximity activation on everything. Modern games have generally brought explicit activation back by situationally overriding attack, but hunting for push walls in Wolf by shooting every tile wouldn't work out. There were some combat tactics involving explicitly shutting doors that are gone with automatic-use, and some secret push walls are trivially found when you pick up an item in front of them now, but this was definitely the right decision.
You could switch weapons in Wolf, but almost nobody actually did, except for occasionally conserving ammo with the chain gun, or challenges like "beat the game with only the knife". That functionality didn't justify the interface clutter.
The concept of "lives" was still in wolf, with 1-ups and extras at certain scores. We ditched that in Doom, which was actually sort of innovative at the time, since action games on computers and consoles were still very much take-the-quarter arcade oriented. I miss the concept of "score" in a lot of games today, but I think the finite and granular nature of the enemies, tasks, and items in Wolf is better suited to end-of-level stats, so I removed both lives and score, but added persistent awards for par time, 100% kills, 100% secrets, and 100% treasures. The award alone wasn't enough incentive to make treasures relevant, so I turned them into uncapped +1 health crumbs, which makes you always happy to find them.
I increased the pickup radius for items, which avoided the mild frustration of having to sometimes make a couple passes at an item when you are cleaning up a room full of stuff.
I doubled the starting ammo on a fresh level start. If a player just got killed, it isn't good to frustrate them even more with a severe ammo conservation constraint. There was some debate about the right way to handle death: respawn with the level as is (good in that you can keep making progress if you just get one more shot off each time, bad in that weapon pickups are no longer available), respawn just as you entered the level (good -- keep your machinegun / chaingun, bad -- you might have 1 health), or, what I chose, restart the map with basic stats just as if you had started the map from the menu.
There are 60 levels in the original Wolf dataset, and I wanted people to have the freedom to easily jump around between different levels and skills, so there is no enforcement of starting at the beginning. The challenge is to /complete /a level, not /get to/ a level. It is fun to start filling in the grid of level completions and awards, and it often feels better to try a different level after a death. The only exception to the start-anywhere option is that you must find the entrance to the secret levels before you can start a new game there.
In watching the early testers, the biggest issue I saw was people sliding off doors before they opened, and having to maneuver back around to go through. In Wolf, as far as collision detection was concerned, everything was just a 64x64 tile map that was either solid or passable.
Doors changed the tile state when they completed opening or began closing. There was discussion about magnetizing the view angle towards doors, or somehow beveling the areas around the doors, but it turned out to be pretty easy to make the door tiles only have a solid central core against the player, so players would slide into the "notch" with the door until it opened. This made a huge improvement in playability.
There is definitely something to be said for a game that loads in a few seconds, with automatic save of your position when you exit. I did a lot of testing by playing the game, exiting to take notes in the iPhone notepad, then restarting Wolf to resume playing. Not having to skip through animated logos at the start is nice. We got this pretty much by accident with the very small and simple nature of Wolf, but I think it is worth specifically optimizing for in future titles.
The original point of this project was to investigate FPS control schemes for the iPhone, and a lot of testing was done with different schemes and parameters. I was sort of hoping that there would be one "obviously correct" way to control it, but it doesn't turn out to be the case.
For a casual first time player, it is clearly best to have a single forward / back / turn control stick and a fire button.
Tilt control is confusing for first exposure to the game, but I think it does add to the fun factor when you use it. I like the tilt-to-move option, but people that play a lot of driving games on the iPhone seem to like tilt-to-turn, where you are sort of driving BJ through the levels. Tilt needs a decent deadband, and a little bit of filtering is good. I was surprised that the precision on the accelerometer was only a couple degrees, which makes it poorly suited for any direct mapped usage, but it works well enough as a relative speed control.
Serious console gamers tend to take to the "dual stick" control modes easily for movement, but the placement of the fire button is problematic. Using an index finger to fire is effective but uncomfortable. I see many players just move the thumb to fire, using strafe movement for fine tuning aim. It is almost tempting to try to hijack the side volume switch for fire, but the ergonomics aren't quite right, and it would be very un-Apple-like, and wouldn't be available on the iPod touch (plus I couldn't figure out how...).
We tried a tilt-forward to fire to allow you to keep your thumbs on the dual control sticks, but it didn't work out very well. Forward / back tilt has the inherent variable holding angle problem for anything, and a binary transition point is hard for people to hold without continuous feedback. Better visual feedback on the current angle and trip point would help, but we didn't pursue it much. For a game with just, say, a rocket launcher, shake/shove-to-fire might be interesting, but it isn't any good for wolf.
It was critical for the control sticks to be analog, since digital direction pads have proven quite ineffective on touch screens due to progressive lack of registration during play. With an analog stick, the player has continuous visual feedback of the stick position in most cases, so they can self correct. Tuning the deadband and slide off behavior are important.
Level design criteria has advanced a lot since Wolfenstein, but I wasn't going to open up the option of us modifying the levels, even though the start of the first level is painfully bad for a first time player, with the tiny, symmetric rooms for them to get their nose mashed into walls and turned around in. The idea is that you started the game in a prison cell after bashing your guard over the head, but even with the exact same game tools, we would lead the player through the experience much better now. Some of the levels are still great fun to play, and it is interesting to read Tom Hall and John Romero's designer notes in the old hint manuals, but the truth is that some levels were scrubbed out in only a couple hours, unlike the long process of testing and adjustment that goes on today.
It was only after I thought I was basically done with the game that Tim Willits pointed out the elephant in the gameplay room -- for 95% of players, wandering around lost in a maze isn't very much fun.
Implementing an automap was pretty straightforward, and it probably added more to the enjoyment of the game than anything else. Before adding this, I thought that only a truly negligible amount of people would actually finish all 60 levels, but now I think there might be enough people that get through them to justify bringing the Spear of Destiny levels over later.
When I was first thinking about the project I sort of assumed that we wouldn't bother with music, but Wolf3D Redux already had code that converted audio tracks from one of the later commercial Wolf releases and encoding at a different bitrate, but I probably wouldn't have bothered if not for tthe old id music format into ogg, so we would up with support at the beginning, and it turned out pretty good. We wound up ripping the red book he initial support. It would have been nice to re-record the music with a high quality MIDI synth, but we didn't have the original MIDI source, and Christian said that the conversion back from the id music format to midi was a little spotty, and would take a fair amount of work to get right. I emailed Bobby Prince, the original composer, to see if he had any high quality versions still around, but he didn't get back with me.
The game is definitely simplistic by modern standards, but it still has its moments. Getting the drop on a brown shirt just as he is pulling his pistol from the holster. Making an SS do the "twitchy dance" with your machine gun. Rounding a corner and unloading your weapon on ... a potted plant. Simplistic plays well on the iPhone.
*Programming notes*
Cass and I got the game running on the iPhone very quickly, but I was a little disappointed that various issues around the graphics driver, the input processing, and the process scheduling meant that doing a locked-at-60-hz game on the iPhone wasn't really possible. I hope to take these up with Apple at some point in the future, but it meant that Wolf would be a roughly two tick game. It is only "roughly" because there is no swapinterval support, and the timer scheduling has a lot of variability in it. It doesn't seem to matter all that much, the play is still smooth and fun, but I would have liked to at least contrast it with the perfect limit case.
It turns out that there were a couple issues that required work even at 30hz. For a game like Wolf, any PC that is in use today is essentially infinitely fast, and the Wolf3D Redux code did some things that were convenient but wasteful. That is often exactly the right thing to do, but the iPhone isn't quite as infinitely fast as a desktop PC.
Wolfenstein (and Doom) originally drew the characters as sparse stretched columns of solid pixels (vertical instead of horizontal for efficiency in interleaved planar mode-X VGA), but OpenGL versions need to generate a square texture with transparent pixels. Typically this is then drawn by either alpha blending or alpha testing a big quad that is mostly empty space. You could play through several early levels of Wolf without this being a problem, but in later levels there are often large fields of dozens of items that stack up to enough overdraw to max out the GPU and drop the framerate to 20 fps. The solution is to bound the solid pixels in the texture and only draw that restricted area, which solves the problem with most items, but Wolf has a few different heavily used ceiling lamp textures that have a small lamp at the top and a thin but full width shadow at the bottom. A single bounds doesn't exclude many texels, so I wound up including two bounds, which made them render many times faster.
The other problem was CPU related. Wolf3d Redux used the original ray casting scheme to find out which walls were visible, then called a routine to draw each wall tile with OpenGL calls. The code looked something like this:
DrawWall( int wallNum ) {
char name[128];
texture_t *tex;
sprintf( name, "walls/%d.tga", wallNum );
tex = FindTexture( name );
...
}
texture_t FindTexture( const char *name ) {
int i;
for ( i = 0 ; i < numTextures ; i++ ) {
if ( !strcmp( name, texture[name]->name ) ) {
return texture[name];
}
}
...
}
I winced when I saw that at the top of the instruments profile, but again, you could play all the early levels that only had twenty or thirty visible tiles at a time without it actually being a problem.
However, some later levels with huge open areas could have over a hundred visible tiles, and that led to 20hz again. The solution was a trivial change to something resembling:
DrawWall( int wallNum ) {
texture_t *tex = wallTextures[wallNum];
...
}
Wolf3D Redux included a utility that extracted the variously packed media from the original games and turned them into cleaner files with modern formats. Unfortunately, an attempt at increasing the quality of the original art assets by using hq2x graphics scaling to turn the 64x64 art into better filtered 128x128 arts was causing lots of sprites to have fringes around them due to incorrect handling of alpha borders. It wasn't possible to fix it up at load time, so I had to do the proper outline-with-color-but-0-alpha operations in a modified version of the extractor. I also decided to do all the format conversion and mip generation there, so there was no significant CPU time spent during texture loading, helping to keep the load time down. I experimented with the PVRTC formats, but while it would have been ok for the walls, unlike with DXT you can't get a lossless alpha mask out of it, so it wouldn't have worked for the sprites. Besides, you really don't want to mess with the carefully chosen pixels in a 64x64 block very much when you scale it larger than the screen on occasion.
I also had to make one last minute hack change to the original media -- the Red Cross organization had asserted their trademark rights over red crosses (sigh) some time after we released the original Wolfenstein 3D game, and all new game releases must not use red crosses on white backgrounds as health symbols. One single, solitary sprite graphic got modified for this release.
User interface code was the first thing I started making other programmers do at Id when I no longer had to write every line of code in a project, because I usually find it tedious and unrewarding. This was such a small project that I went ahead and did it myself, and I learned an interesting little thing. Traditionally, UI code has separate drawing and input processing code, but on a touchscreen device, it often works well to do a combined "immediate mode interface", with code like this:
if ( DrawPicWithTouch( x, y, w, h, name ) ) {
menuState = newState;
}
Doing that for the floating user gameplay input controls would introduce a frame of response latency, but for menus and such, it works very well.
One of the worst moments during the development was when I was getting ready to hook up the automatic savegame on app exit. There wasn't any savegame code. I went back and grabbed the original 16 bit dos code for load / save game, but when I compiled I found out that the Wolf3d Redux codebase had changed a lot more than just the near / far pointer issues, asm code, and comment blocks. The changes were sensible things, like grouping more variables into structures and defining enums for more things, but it did mean that I wasn't dealing with the commercially tested core that I thought I was. It also meant that I was a lot more concerned about a strange enemy lerping through the world bug I had seen a couple times.
I seriously considered going back to the virgin codebase and reimplementing the OpenGL rendering from scratch. The other thing that bothered me about the Redux codebase was that it was basically a graft of the Wolf3D code into the middle of a gutted Quake 2 codebase. This was cool in some ways, because it gave us a console, cvars, and the system / OpenGL portable framework, and it was clear the original intention was to move towards multiplayer functionality, but it was a lot of bloat. The original wolf code was only a few dozen C files, while the framework around it here was several times that.
Looking through the original code brought back some memories. I stopped signing code files years ago, but the top of WL_MAIN.C made me smile:
/*
=============================================================================
WOLFENSTEIN 3-D
An Id Software production
by John Carmack
=============================================================================
*/
It wasn't dated, but that would have been in 1991.
In the end, I decided to stick with the Redux codebase, but I got a lot more free with hacking big chunks of it out. I reimplemented load / save game (fixing the inevitable pointer bugs involved), and by littering asserts throughout the code, I tracked the other problem down to an issue with making a signed comparison against one of the new enum types that compare as unsigned. I'm still not positive if this was the right call, since the codebase is sort of a mess with lots of vestigial code that doesn't really do anything, and I don't have time to clean it all up right now.
Of course, someone else is welcome to do that. The full source code for the commercial app is available on the web site. There was a little thought given to the fact that if I had reverted to the virgin source, the project wouldn't be required to be under the GPL. Wolf and the app store presents a sort of unique situation -- a user can't just compile the code and choose not to pay for the app, because most users aren't registered developers, and the data isn't readily available, but there is actually some level of commercial risk in the fast-moving iPhone development community. It will not be hard to take the code that is already fun to play, pull a bunch of fun things off the net out of various projects people have done with the code over the years, dust off some old map editors, and load up with some modern quality art and sound.
Everyone is perfectly within their rights to go do that, and they can aggressively try to bury the original game if they want. However, I think there is actually a pretty good opportunity for cooperation. If anyone makes a quality product and links to the original Wolf app, we can start having links to "wolf derived" or "wolf related" projects.
That should turn out to be a win for everyone.
I'm going back to Rage for a while, but I do expect Classic Doom to come fairly soon for the iPhone.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
That's what makes me suspect it's probably not entirely true.
I'll take the bait.
Why is it that different? I don't think the Wii is going to destroy gaming just because it's popularized gaming for the mainstream. For that same reason, I don't think the iPhone is the same way. After all, the thing just got started!
I think the biggest problem does have to do with the mountain of games on the system (how to tell the gems from the crap), but that can be solved by improving the browsing interface of the app store, and adding things like ratings/reviews. That's not a difficult thing to do, since numerous marketplaces (like Amazon) do this. I'm pretty confident that we'll start seeing that model come to other app stores (and for that matter, Xbox LIVE Marketplace, PSN, WiiWare, etc.).
- Don't add me, I'm at/near the friend limit
Steam: JC_Rooks
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JiunweiC
I work on this: http://www.xbox.com
http://gear.ign.com/articles/965/965841p1.html
Is this going to work in attracting casuals? I have my doubts not, even though I think motion control is inevitable at some point for the 360 and PS3, I just think its going to require first party support, 3rd party peripherals don't usually work out that well.
Well honestly if you look at the rankings and the user ratings on the App store most of the best Apps are listed there. So there is the survival of the fittest method of keeping the crap under control. As for the refund policy, think this has come into light after that guy made like $8000 on selling a picture as a $1000 App.
It's a third party periph with a cheesy minigame compilation pack-in.
The mass market has already made up its mind and stuff like this isn't going to change anything in terms of "attracting casual audience" or whatever.
I'd honestly be surprised if this thing got any support outside of the "Squeeballs" pack-in it comes with, and maybe one or two other token titles from the same company.
As is the case with most third party peripherals, this thing will likely fade quickly into obscurity and be forgotten. Oh wait it has to be known before it can be forgotten. It will fade quickly from obscurity into oblivion.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Can't say that I really see Microsoft or Nintendo needing to launch a new system for awhile but I think its safe to say that there will probably be multiple console generations to come.
Agreed. There have been motion control peripherals for games before the Wii, yet they always seemed to be relegated to mall island kiosks with crappy games as demos. What you have to do is follow it up with games and Nintendo has a strong enough first party development team to do this.
- Don't add me, I'm at/near the friend limit
Steam: JC_Rooks
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JiunweiC
I work on this: http://www.xbox.com
It takes more than a mere controller, good though it may be, and a single cartoony minigame compilation to pull that off; especially for consoles that have firm market mindshare as traditional consoles.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
We could actually see some companies attempting to port/upgrade Wii games and release them on the 360 or PS3 though. That would be pretty funny.
There will always be a next big thing whether it be new technology that simply make shit easier like a possible physics card, simple shit like a holographic disc format, or insane shit like the wiimote. Nobody knows what might happen with the emerging markets. Sure the cycle might lengthen, but it won't die. The cycle hasn't even died with movie formats.
I predict we will be laughing in the future at how we thought games wouldn't get any more expensive for the publishers.
!? o_O Do these guys live in a magical world of makebelieve?
Why the fuck would they do that when no other console company has done that, and Sony has no reason to not do what they did and to stick around unless it magically becomes a huge success.
Yeah, that's quite a leap of faith to make. Not outside the realm of possibility, but still not that likely....
Backpedaling on his main claim within the same keynote. Hmm.
My prediction for next-next-gen: No fucking clue. Predicting what the world will be like in a decade or so is impossible.
I think he's talking about 10 years from now. In other words, in 2019, the consoles will be XBox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii HD. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I could conceivably see that being the outcome. If I had to put a date on when the next generation comes out, I'd say...
*spins a wheel*
2017.
Assuming Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft haven't all been submerged thanks to the polar ice caps melting as a result of global warming, of course.
3DS FC: 0817-3759-2788
I think the future of gaming is directly streamed to your monitor/tv gaming, the only question is whether that will happen fast enough. If it happens early enough it will preclude a next gen launch (which will be delayed anyway given the economics).
The question is if the industry is ever going to grow the fuck up and we all standardize on one 'platform' akin to DVD. It's fucking stupid that we have to distribute 4 different versions of the game game, which is pushing 4 other, smaller games off the shelves. It's stupid that we have to stock 3 different versions of the same guitar controller because nobody can standardize on a controller interface.
Then, and only then, will the industry have truly grown and take off. For now though, it just ends up eating it's young and each other.
It was silly when we had 3 different movie formats on the market, and it's still silly with two, but at least Blu Ray players can play all DVDs. Music only has one format, people would laugh at the idea of CDs that only work on Sony players and CDs that only work on Phillips players. It's silly that the same exact game has to have 4 different versions pressed and tested.
Even the DVD had competition. VHS had competition. Blu-Ray had competition.
All that's going to happen with the games industry from here on out is that one console will always have a gigantic lead and the 2 others will split the other half of the userbase.
There's also the fact that the Xbox is not actually that 'safe' since it could be killed by a shareholder revolt at any moment - they don't have the "pride" factor of Sony in that regard.
What happens if Sony ends up in third again? Either they pull out and they just have their developers work on the uniconsole format, or they continue to bleed money because people think competition actually means something in the games industry anymore.
I doubt the shareholders care much about the 360 either way. It is making a profit right now so they have no reason to attack it.
The 360 provides a platform for those who want HD gaming and a solid online experience. It also hits a nice middle of the road as far as price is concerned. The PS3 takes on a higher price at its own expense but in doing so gives people extremely impressive and powerful tech and offers users a next generation format for watching movies. The Wii offers up a new way to play games at an affordable price and gives people a venue for playing retro games that they enjoyed. So in the end you have something for everybody, whereas one format forces everyone into accepting its unified and rigid terms and conditions.
Streamed gaming also solves the problem of piracy.
It will only be a matter of time.
There's need to be competition between the console makers; if there were no SEGA to compete with Nintendo, which eventually attracted Sony into the market, we'd probably just be getting Gamecube's by now.