Seite 2: Interview mit Resolution Interactive zum Thema iPhone-Spiele

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PlanetiPhone.de: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and Resolution Interactive?

John Westin: My name is Johan Westin and I'm a game producer here at Resolution. I'm a gamer at heart and I've been hooked on games and game development ever since my first gaming sessions as a kid on the C64 way back in the middle of the eighties. Basically I'm the one responsible for the overall quality of our products and makes sure that ”things get done” by providing the resources the team requires to reach milestones and complete our projects.

Resolution Interactive AB was founded in 2003 and develops high quality games for iPhone, PC, consoles and mobile devices. The near proximity of Umeå University and several top class video gaming schools has enabled Resolution Interactive to recruit and expand a very talented team with experience on most platforms.

PlanetiPhone.de: What have you done so far?

John Westin: To date Resolution releases include Clusterball® Arcade, Aqua Moto™ Racing and Dirt Moto™ Racing for iPhone/iPod Touch, Clusterball® and Ski-Doo® X-Team Racing™ for PC, Furiae® for Mobile. In addition, Resolution has developed a network API; Autobahn™ and a proprietary in-game advertising technology; DABS™.

PlanetiPhone.de: What is it like to develop for iPhone and iPod Touch. Are there any restrictions you have to keep in mind or any limitations from Apple?

John Westin: Development on the Mac platform is not one of the more difficult we've come across. Especially when comparing it to mobile platforms such as the Symbian S60 or other handheld platforms such as the Nintendo DS. Of course we've had our share of troubles during our learning process, such as minor problems when setting up the development environment and some provisioning issues. But on the whole it's not that different from developing applications to the PC platform.

The biggest limitations we've encountered with the current hardware (excluding the 3G S) has been memory usage. We've learned that you always have to keep memory usage below a certain level, since bad things starts to happen once you have recieved a memory warning from the system.

The only restrictions and limitations from Apple are provided in developer guidelines, such as Human Interface Guidlines. And as long as the applications follow these specified guidelines it will pass the review phase required before publication on the App Store.



PlanetiPhone.de: Can you tell us more about the development teams? How long does it take to make a complete game and what size are the teams?

John Westin: Currently we have only one ”core team” consisting of 9 team members. It took us about 10 weeks to complete ”Aqua Moto Racing” and almost 4 months to complete ”Dirt Moto Racing”.

PlanetiPhone.de: Your latest product is Dirt Moto Racing. Can you tell us more about the game?

John Westin: It's an ATV off-road racing game in full 3D with extreme stunt elements. The objective of Dirt Moto Racing is to race your ATV on various events situated in 4 real-world locations. Ride with state of the art physics as well as stunning visuals and effects. Compete with fierce computer-controlled opponents or download and challenge the ghosts of the world's best riders online. Unlock new tours, single events, achievements and tuning points in career mode as you're progressing through the single-player portion of the game and towards the world elite.

PlanetiPhone.de: How can you track how many people download the games? Are there any developer tools to keep you informed on your own success?

John Westin: Yes, we are able to download daily trend reports that gives us a detailed prognosis regarding sales and downloads on the App Store through the iTunes Connect account.

PlanetiPhone.de: What do think about the iPhone 3GS. Will it improve future game development and how?

John Westin: The arrival of ”OpenGL ES 2.0” on the platform with the iPhone 3G S should enable us to raise the bar in terms of visual quality for the graphics as well as performance when considering the new shader support.

One example of shader implementation that we'll look into is hardware skinning of meshes that will make animations of bones more versatile, such as blending of animations, and hopefully it'll enable better performance rather than using the CPU for this type of calculations.

Better and more accurate lightning in our future products is something that we should be able to achieve with this new hardware platform, rather than using vertex lightning. Though we've shown with our games that it's actually possible to generate adequate lightning of terrain using vertex lightning.

The big question regarding this new hardware platform is how it will affect the market in general. Will it create a devide in the game segment with premium ”3G S only” games? Or will we see new games being developed with 2 versions; a ”legacy version” and a ”3G S version”? Or perhaps only one version that will scale graphics and gameplay depending on which device is being used? We will just have to wait and see.



PlanetiPhone.de: Do you have any future plans, what are you working on at the moment?

John Westin: We are currently planning development on a Lite version of Dirt Moto Racing, as well as updates for Aqua Moto Racing and Dirt Moto Racing. We are also looking to improve our community service by improving and adding new features to the ”Resolution Account”. And naturally we're also planning development of new products for the iPhone / iPod Touch platform.

PlanetiPhone.de: What is your opinion on download distribution. What do you think of DSiWare or the PSPgo?

John Westin: Personally I think that download distribution is the way of the future which has the potential to give more power to the developers when creating and distributing their products. It has the potential to give the customers a larger range and cheaper products. And it has the potential to generate more revenue to the publishers when considering the increased availability of products towards the customers.

DsiWare and PSPgo shows that Nintendo and Sony isn't ignoring digital downloads for the handheld market. But it will probably take some time before they are able to compete with Apple's App Store when compairing the number of available devices and the number of users between the current three platforms.

PlanetiPhone.de: Is there anything you would like to tell our readers?

John Westin: Everyone here at Resolution appreciate valid critisism from our community, since it helps us to improve our future games. Also I would like to point out the fact that we are gamers just like you in the community and we take pride in making the best games possible given our limited resources. So all I can say is test our games and bring us your suggestions for improvements, because we do take all these under serious consideration during the development process.

Finally I would like to conclude this interview by stating that we here at Resolution are very happy to see how the gaming community has embraced our latest release. That's the single most important thing that motivates us during the creation of our upcoming games!

The interview was held by Kevin Jensen for PlanetiPhone.de