Carmack weighs iPhone goals against resources

id Software co-founder John Carmack has made known his ambitions for developing iPhone games, but at the same time revealed that his studio hasn’t quite got the resources to match them.

Carmack, whose longstanding studio was acquired by Zenimax earlier in the year, revealed in a blog post that id will dedicate just two of its whole workforce to full-time iPhone game development.

“Everything is still an experiment for us on the iPhone,” he said, “and we are learning lessons with each product.”

Carmack revealed that he wants to build a Rage-themed iPhone title to coincide with the release of the PC, PS3 and 360 edition of the game in 2010.

But the studio co-founder explained the studio doesn’t have “a firm direction or team chosen” to work on such a title.

“I was very excited about doing a really-designed-for-the-iPhone first person shooter, but at this point I am positive that I don’t have the time available for it,” he added.

“I doubt I will be able to personally open Xcode again for a few months, but I do plan on trying to work out a good touch interface for Quake Classic and the later 6DOF games.

“I also very much want to make at least a tech demo that can run media created with a version of our idTech 5 megatexture content creation pipeline. I’m not sure exactly what game I would like to do with it, so it might be a 500 mb free gee-whiz app…”