With Unreal strutting its stuff on the iPhone at Apple’s special event in San Francisco, Epic is looking to bring larger titles to an Apple iOS device in the near future. The reveal of the Epic Citadel demo and Project Sword represent a possible shift in bringing triple-A titles to the platform, as “it would not be smart to compete with the Bejeweleds and Angry Birds of the world on the iPhone,” says Epic president Mike Capps in an interview with Gamasutra.
The proof of concept has finally been posted with Epic Citadel; the Unreal Engine is ready to go for the iOS. “Everything's supported,” says Capps. “The difference of course is that it's not quite as powerful a graphics processor as on the Xbox 360, so you'll probably do some custom content work, but you're using the same tool chain of UnrealEd and Kismet and the same physics tools and everything.”
“With the expansion of the Unreal Development Kit, we've got hundreds of thousands of folks who are messing around with the tools doing smaller projects,” he adds. “So we're not really just about giant triple-A console games anymore. Those are the ones -- Mass Effect gets press, but there are lots of small hobby groups or casual gamers using Unreal Engine. I think it's perfect for them. It's what they've been missing.”
As for his thoughts on Apple’s new Game Center, “I don't have to worry about the interface. Which, as a developer, is huge, right? That's something Xbox Live gave us. You don't need to skin it. It's good, it's there, and it's done, and you don't have to do that part of the job.”
”And for us, that's what Game Center does. It solves all of those problems. Basically, they got the benefit of seeing what everyone else did with the social networking space on game consoles, and they took all the best ideas and re-implemented them better, so I'm very happy with it.”
This could very well be a new direction for the social and mobile markets, and Epic knows that it cannot compete with the various social developers out there. "They're doing a great job. For me it's about, can we take the gaming experiences -- not just Gears, but like Shadow Complex that we've done on other platforms, and bring that kind of quality to the mobile devices, and right now I feel like we can,” he said.
