Infinity Blade Answers the Call for iPhone Gaming
Infinity Blade Answers the Call for iPhone Gaming
Several months ago, Epic Games released a free iPhone app called Epic Citadel. It contained a stunning 3D medieval town that could be explored by touching and dragging one’s finger across the landscape. Epic Citadel was released to show off the visual capability of the company’s Unreal Engine 3, which also powers its blockbuster shooter Gears of War. The first iPhone game to use the engine is Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade. Its fantastical imagery looks closer to that of a high-definition gaming console than the iPhone, whose most successful games use two-dimensional or cartoonish art.
Infinity Blade will go a long way in convincing skeptics that Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch are serious gaming devices. Says Chair’s creative director Donald Mustard, “I had no idea these things were so powerful. They’re not as powerful as a console yet, but they will be. It’s hard to argue with the power of the device and with the number of people that are walking around with these devices.”
Speakeasy spoke with Mustard, also the lead designer of Infinity Blade, about the game.
The Wall Street Journal: How would you sum up the gameplay and the core fantasy of Infinity Blade?
Donald Mustard: The game is an action-RPG swordfighting game. We thought the device provided a unique opportunity to create a really intuitive swordfighting game that had precision in its controls. We can literally have an enemy coming at you with a sword strike, and as it’s coming at you with some funky angle, you can swipe your finger back at it and knock the blade away, opening the enemy up for attack. That’s the core of the gameplay, this fast and frenetic swordfighting game, with lots of other elements built around it.
It reminds me of some of the gameplay potential that the Wii had seemed to promise but didn’t deliver.
And I think it’s kind of different. I agree. There’s just something about the ability to see where your finger is. Standing 10 feet away from the TV, there’s still not that direct, one-to-one relationship. Seeing a sword coming at you, and swiping your finger right against it, gives it a lot more of that one-to-one relationship, allows us to make it a lot faster and a lot more precise.
How important are blockbuster-quality graphics to a mobile game? Would you have made this game with a less powerful engine, or a more abstract art style?
We certainly could have. I really love some of the abstractions you get with more 2D engines, or even using 3D in a way that looks really, really abstract—something like Limbo for Xbox Live Arcade. But I think if your’e going to go 3D, you need to have that visual fidelity. I’ve been really not impressed with the 3D games that I’ve seen on the iOS devices. They look like what you’d expect. They look like really really early-generation 3D games.
For me, as a gamer, when I can actually have the fidelity of a 50-foot cave troll standing in front of my guy—I can see all the ripples in his skin and all that detail, and I’m looking at it on the Retina display of my iPhone 4—that’s exciting. A lot of this technology is coming online as we’re making it. Looking at some of the characters on the screen, I still cannot believe it’s on a phone. We’re putting almost literally the same resolution of character on this screen as we would into a console title. These characters have the same polygons, the same bone count, the same texture map sizes. Just seeing that in your hand is a pretty stunning experience, and to me, enhances the gameplay.
What are the cinematic aspects of the game?
Being able to have a fully realized three-dimensional environment that I can move the camera through at any time, it lets me do these wider establishing shots of the castle. As your character starts moving toward the castle gate, I can pull the camera back dynamically and have a wide shot, cut into a closeup of the character’s face, and cut back out. We can make it feel more cinematic when I click on the enemy to fight him, and I see my guy walk up to him, and I can cut back to the character as they square off and start fighting. [Early games] didn’t have the buildup that we can do now, with good cameras and sound and music. We tried to push a lot of that really polished AAA presentation into everything.
You’ve alluded to this, but is there a backstory to the game?
There is! We can’t help but make huge stories. The story that we hint at in Infinity Blade is just the very tip of the iceberg of the story that we’d love to tell in the franchise. The plot is self-contained, but it has little hooks for other things that we can do. There’s the God King who seemingly rules the land. We begin the game where most stories would end, with our hero approaching the dark lord’s chamber, at the end of his journey, to take out the God King. Things go wrong, and we set up the story from there, as the hero that we think is the hero of legend is absolutely decimated by the God King. But the God King sees something in the hero that he wants to propagate and exploit, and that’s where the game starts.
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