Sponsored Feature: TAG Games talks Car Jack Streets

We're still itching to find out if Rockstar Leeds really is working on a Grand Theft Auto iPhone game - one of the best rumours at the recent Games Convention show in Leipzig.

But if you read yesterday's news story on Car Jack Streets, you'll know that I-play's upcoming mobile game is closely inspired by the original top-down Grand Theft Auto games.

TAG boss Paul Farley (who worked on those games while at DMA Design) has talked us through the new project. "We wanted to produce something that really captures the atmosphere and key gameplay aspects of the original GTA," says Farley.

"GTA came from an incredibly creative environment basically paid for by the money from Lemmings. We had a bunch of newly-graduated programmers, artists and designers who'd never worked on a game before, so didn't really know any constraints. We came up with this smorgasbord of ideas, and if they worked, they stayed in the game!"

The development of Car Jack Streets has been slightly more focused, but like GTA, the crux of the game isn't the shooting - it's the driving.

"The first few months on Car Jack Streets was spent just fiddling with vehicles and changing the detail, playing with the settings so you could skid round corners for fun, and get a clear sense of the vehicle differences," says Farley.

"Ultimately, if everything else in the game fails, we've produced a title with a great driving mechanic."

This included the decision to use 32 frames of animation for cars turning, rather than the standard 16 seen in other top-down mobile driving games. "We wanted the driving experience to feel really fluid," says Farley.

However, second to that was the idea of an open city and mission structure, so that players would feel the freedom to go anywhere and do anything, rather than follow a strictly linear mission structure.

As we explained yesterday, the game's storyline is based around you paying off a million-dollar gambling debt by completing various missions, with the aim of paying back $50,000 every real-world week.

"You can play for 10-15 minutes five or six times a week to make the $50,000, or you can do it all in one sitting," says Farley.

Just as innovative is the way the real-world time is incorporated into the game, so if you're playing at 5pm, it'll be 5pm in the game too, and you might get offered a mission that relies on you being at a certain place at 10pm.

"There are 12 missions that are always available, like driving taxis, delivering pizzas and stealing cars to sell at the docks," says Farley. "And then every real-life day, there'll be 4-5 missions generated that are more criminal in nature, like robbing a bank, carrying out a hit or delivering a package."

So how do you find your way around the city itself? GPS, of course. When offered a mission, you can call up your GPS using the left soft-key, and select its location. The result is an on-screen arrow guiding you to the destination.

"It's a nice real-world mechanic to hang off, and it saves having a mini-map," says Farley. "It also encourages people to find their own routes."

The game uses two seperate zoom levels to show the city. When you're driving, the camera zooms out so you can see more of the roads around you. When you're on foot, it zooms in, so you can see where you're going.

As you'd expect, there's a bunch of weapons available in the game. Here, too, plenty of thought has gone into what types should be put in.

"They're all area weapons, like machine guns, shotguns, molotov cocktails and rocket launchers," says Farley. "We didn't want people to be struggling to get a pinpoint aim when shooting people."

One valid question is over how the game handles its criminal subject matter, given the fact that many mobile operators have concerns about selling violent or criminal games on their portals.

"We're not an 18+ developer," says Farley. "We want to make sure as many people as possible can play. We also like the idea of people using their imagination while playing - something that's been lost on console because the graphics are so realistic, and the AI is so complex."

An example of how you're supposed to use your imagination is with the missions. You might get asked to deliver a package, but you're not told what's in it.

The obvious assumption is drugs, of course, but it's you making that assumption, steering Car Jack Streets away from the sort of controversy that recently erupted around the DS version of GTA's drug-dealing mini-game.

There's not even any blood in Car Jack Streets. "When you kill someone, they turn into a chalk crime-scene outline," says Farley, chuckling. "We're not trying to make something that becomes as notorious as GTA did. That's why we haven't hired Max Clifford to promote it!"

There's bags to say about Car Jack Streets - we haven't even mentioned the jumps, the fact that you can knock over fire hydrants, race time trials on a racetrack, or find a 'Gang' power-up that calls a couple of Irish mobsters to be your wingmates.

"It's almost like an R-Type power-up," says Farley. "It was the little touches of detail that endeared GTA to people, so we've spent a bit of time adding them into Car Jack."

For the moment, Car Jack Streets will be a Java and a BREW game for Europe and North America.

However, TAG Games is a registered iPhone developer, and while Farley has no comment to make on a potential iPhone release, we wouldn't be surprised to see the company pursue that route.

N-Gage is another possibility (if we were Nokia, we'd be giving TAG a call sharpish to get Car Jack City onto that platform anyway). In the meantime, Farley is happy to be working with one of his former employers, I-play, on the game's mobile release.

"They have a great track record commercially with games in this genre," he says, citing The Fast and the Furious series as an example. "Out of all potential partners for the title, they showed the best understanding of what we are trying to achieve with the title, and also how ambitious it is."

He's confident that the game will find its audience on mobile, too.

"A lot of people might not ever pay off the $1 million debt, but they'll have a lot of fun trying," says Farley. Stand by for our hands-on preview of the game tomorrow.