Interviews

WWDC 2009: Shooting the breeze with ngmoco over FPS LiveFire

Is this the first use of the Quake III engine on iPhone?

WWDC 2009: Shooting the breeze with ngmoco over FPS LiveFire
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At ngmoco party, the iPhone publisher was celebrating the successful launch of its Star Defense game but also gearing up for its internally-developed first person shooter, which has the working title LiveFire.

It's a fascinating project, in terms of the challenge of getting a fast-paced multiplayer-focused shooter running across four networked iPhones, as well as how to make a solid touchscreen FPS control system - not to mention all the micro-transactional plans ngmoco is hoping to employ when the 3.0 firmware is released in June

We caught up with art director Chris Lee (pictured) to talk through some of the issues that have arisen during the 2-3 months development cycle.

In terms of the overall art direction, he said the goal for LiveWire was a clean look, rather than the grungy environments typical of console shooters such as Doom.

"We want the levels to be tight with plenty of corners and turns to keep the action dynamic," he explained. "This isn't a game where you can sit still with a sniper rifle and camp. We want to guarantee death for all players during a match."

So far, four maps are expected to ship with the game. Of course, there are more maps available, but Lee explained those four had been judged the best. We were playing on a multi-layered area with a deep pool of water in the middle. The best weapons were located at the bottom of this pool but its openness made you very vulnerable. And yes our frequent death was guaranteed.

The core technology for LiveFire is the Quake III engine, which is now available via open source. "Why wouldn't you use Quake III for a shooter?" Lee pointed out.

Of course, the engine has been massively rewritten in parts such as the renderer in order to get it working on the iPhone, but as an OpenGL technology, its fundamentals are well suited to what ngmoco required. "One of our coders pretty much ripped it apart and put it back together again," Lee revealed.

The announcement of the more powerful iPhone 3G S will create additional opportunities to make the game look impressive. In the interests of continuity however, the core gameplay must run at the same speed across all devices, including iPod touches, which have a slightly higher rated CPU compared to the original iPhone.

Lee said this would be fulfilled by automatically selecting better graphics in terms of lighting - and shaders in the case of the 3G S as this supports OpenGL ES 2.0 - should a device support them.

In terms of its status, the game is now feature-complete with ongoing work involving tweaking the controls and optimising the graphics.

Personally I found the control system fairly intuitive. The mouse-look, which was controlled by moving your thumb on the right hand side of the touchscreen, was nice and sharp.

Rotational speed could be increased, although I was playing one of the heavily armoured and hence more unwieldy characters.

Things were less obvious when it came to movement. This is controlled with your left thumb anywhere on the left hand side of the touchscreen. You touch and hold in the direction you want to go. The issue I had was a tendency to keep tapping the screen, especially as the initial acceleration of my character wasn't high. This was mainly down to my inexperience with the game, but some tweaking of the input system to provide better visual feedback may help players over this tendency.

All in all then, LiveFire looks like it's shaping up to be a technically adroit game. But the wider reaction of the fairly casual App Store audience to the release of a multiplayer FPS on iPhone will be interesting to see.

We expect LiveFire's official name, release date and pricing, as well as full details of the micro-transactions, to be revealed in the near future.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.