Sunset: an FPS RPG for the iPhone

This is the last thing I expected to see a day before Jobs is (hopefully) destined to reveal what can be done with the iPhone SDK, but nevertheless here it is. Donald Hays sent us a link to "Sunset," which is a game he wrote for the iPhone. I was skeptical when he described it as "a 3D RPG," because this is the iPhone we're talking about -- the thing can't even run Flash -- but lo and behold, that's exactly what it is. The graphics are homemade (he says he been working on the game since August of '07), and the genre conventions are many (it's an RPG in the old Dungeons of Daggorath style), so you run around, kill stuff, complete objectives, and level up), but in this case it's not the game that's so amazing, but where and how you're playing it.

Seriously -- go to Donald's site on your iPhone and give it a look yourself. The game's even got an inventory system and a save system built into it. Very impressive work.

Update: Donald has also written up a postmortem of making the game. The first answer to the question in your mind: it's mostly Javascript, and yes, it sounds like a hell of a lot of crazy coding. The end project is pretty incredible, though.