Bethesda Blog has posted a special diary from id Software co-founder John Carmack in which he discusses his work on Rage and id’s Tech 5 game engine. As reported at QuakeCon 2010, Carmack is developing plans to bring Rage and other games based on the Tech 5 engine to the iOS platform.
Carmack’s notes reveal some interesting new information on the company’s first Rage-based iOS game. Carmack notes that during the QuakeCon demo he may have mistakenly led people to believe that the entire Rage PC/console game experience would be coming to the iPhone and indicates here that this is definitely not going to be the case.
While Carmack believes it’s possible to compile the full-blown PC/console Rage for an iPhone 4, he indicates that this would be a “hopelessly bad idea” due to performance tradeoffs and vast differences in controls. Instead, Carmack is developing something based on Rage that will be “unlike anything ever seen on the iOS platforms.” Rage for iOS will be a “little slice of Rage” built around “Mutant Bash TV,” a “post-apocalyptic combat game show in the Rage wasteland.” Carmack notes that it is the ideal setup for a “quintessential first person shooter game play experience” and goes on to state that making sure that levels can be replayed many times was an important goal of the project, which he feels was accomplished by making the gameplay the core aspect rather than focusing on a storyline.