Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.
At its very core, virtual reality is about being freed from the limitations of actual reality. Carrying your virtual reality with you, and being able to jump into it whenever and wherever you want, qualitatively changes the experience for the better. Experiencing mobile VR is like when you first tried a decent desktop VR experience.
Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.
Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.
We had staffed up to do 'Doom 4' internally in parallel with 'Rage'. We also had our mobile and 'Quake Live' departments. We were taking a lot of steps to kind of provide a little bit more scope and protection for ourselves. And we certainly were listening to offers from all the majors about acquisition.
I really do think VR is now one of the most exciting things that can be done in this whole sector of consumer electronic entertainment stuff.
Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming.
High-end BREW phones aren't nearly as limited a gaming platform as you might think - they are a lot more powerful than an original Play Station, for example. Java phones, however, are saddled with a huge disadvantage for gaming.
The cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.
I've never been one of those programmers that works effectively on short amounts of sleep. I've always needed eight hours.
I consider myself a remarkably unsentimental person. I don't look back on the good old days.
It's been great that every title that we've done internally has been a huge success, but when you've got 50 or 100 people on there, all their families and everyone counting on you there, the idea of 'What if you screw up once?' or 'What if the market changes?'
The stereoscopic panoramic videos that we're showing on Samsung VR are getting a lot of positive traction. It's exciting when you see creative types - whether from the music, film, or video industries - look at this stuff. The gears are turning in their head almost immediately about how they can use it as a new medium.
It is true that the gameplay for 'Orcs&Elves' was designed around the limitations of mobile phones, and that if we were starting completely from scratch for the DS, we would probably do things a bit differently, but the bottom line is that when we sit a random DS player down with the game, they have a lot of fun.
After the acquisition of id by Zenimax, we had sort of taken the mobile platform team down to a skeleton crew. We were left with about two people who were finishing up the previous obligations on that. The rest had just been dispersed and absorbed by the other teams in the company.
Oculus really started popularizing a new approach using cellphone screen technology, a wide field of view, and super-low-latency sensor tracking. It's not crappy stuff that doesn't work and makes everybody sick. When you experience Oculus technology, it's like getting religion on contact. People that try it walk out a believer.
It is a shame that homebrew development can't be officially sanctioned and supported, because it would be a wonderful platform for a modern generation of programmers to be able to get a real feel for low level design work, to be contrasted with the high level web and application work that so many entry level people start with.
I did take some value out of looking at the extreme simplicity of implementation that the tight resource limits required. I do feel that modern games are often abstracted a lot more than is really necessary, and it leads to robustness issues.
We were happy with funding 'Rage' on our own nickel for years. We intended to do the same with 'Doom 4'. We had offers early on for 'Rage'. People offered us X million dollars. But we carried the risk, and when we finally signed a deal, it was X plus $10 million.
There are some things that are exciting for distributors. I love Apple's AppStore and the things people can do with digital distribution.
