The new mix of driving and zombie killing makes the most of NVIDIA Tegra 3 technology.
What are your thoughts on how far mobile gaming has come since Tegra was introduced?
The leap in mobile processing power has been astonishing. A few years ago, mobile games had to be developed separately from "big screen" platforms. With the introduction of Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 chipsets we were able to develop for mobile at the same time. Zombie Driver THD is literally running from the same code base with some specific optimizations, different UI and controls, etc. The content is mostly the same with a few lower polygon count models. Essentially, we were able to save a huge amount of time by developing the game once and just tweaking it for the separate platforms, instead of making two games with completely different technology and assets.
How do you see mobile gaming evolving with NVIDIA's roadmap for Tegra 4 and beyond?
We don't know the official specs for Tegra 4, but my guess is that it’s going to be close to the current gen consoles. This will allow for a lot more core titles that will be graphically rich. Being able to use the same code base and assets is a huge enabler for porting and parallel development. We will probably see new consoles next year that will distance themselves from the current handheld devices for a few iterations. However, I think that mobile will be able to catch up to them sooner than in this console cycle. As the evolution of mobile processing power progresses, I think we will see a lot more AAA titles developed simultaneously for handheld devices.
What excites you about the future of mobile game development?
I love the fact that it’s becoming more and more similar to developing on the PC, which means more freedom, better tools and making games faster. I had some experience with mobile development five to seven years ago with Java development. Because of the huge fragmentation in the market and bad technology, we spent over half our development time porting games and dealing with compatibility issues. There was no time to iterate on game design. Currently, we spend just a fraction of that effort on making sure the game runs correctly on all devices, so we have more time to focus on actual game development.
How does your game take advantage of mobile control options like touch screen and accelerometer? How does it support HDMI connections for big screen TVs?
We don't use the accelerometer because we didn't find it precise enough. We have two types of touch controls -- a standard analog stick and fixed digital input directional controls. We also streamlined some mechanics by automatically pressing the gas pedal when turbo is pressed. We fully support game pad controllers and USB keyboard input. The game can run on a big screen TV through HDMI. Our user interface is optimized for smaller handheld devices, as well as tablets and bigger screens.
