Orcs & Elves

Orcs & Elves is a mobile phone game based on the Doom RPG engine and created by John Carmack and Fountainhead Entertainment. The game has also been ported to Nintendo DS.

Story
The game is described as an adventure RPG, in which the protagonist, a young elf, must retake a Dwarven city from the evil army occupying it. The player is equipped initially only with a sentient, talking magic wand and a sword, but other weapons become available.

Engine changes
Compared to Doom RPG, changes in the J2ME version include:
 * The level state is now saved when moving between levels. Some monsters can respawn when revisiting earlier levels.
 * Status effects for monsters.
 * Translucency for monsters and objects is supported, and used in the game.
 * Health bars are drawn (only over the first enemy in the line of fire).
 * Levels can have double-height walls (the texture is repeated).
 * In-game cutscenes added.
 * Maximum range of fire for player restricted from 8 to 5, and monsters far away from the player now stop moving.
 * In-game text screens are now variable width, rather than being sized to fit the smallest supported screen. The game will divide words according to hyphens stored internally. Displaying an hyphen in the middle of a line requires a double hyphen internally.

Game versions
There are five versions of the game:
 * High end BREW - development team liked a lot more development for BREW, than J2ME, so this version was developed first. They have noticed during development, that this was a strategic mistake, as it is always easier to add new features than scale down the project to run on less capable hardware. It required a Qualcomm BREW based phone with 176x220 screen resolution to run.
 * Low end BREW - a scaled down version for less capable Qualcomm BREW based devices. Despite visible downgrade, it still retained more features than low end J2ME version.
 * High end J2ME - this version was available on EA Mobile website, where you could try it before buying (10 minutes time limit). Was running on . It retained most of the features of the high end BREW version. A gameplay from this version is available on YouTube.
 * Low end J2ME - the most scaled down version.
 * Nintendo DS - the original cell phone game had tile-based 2.5D engine that could only render constrained sets of horizontal and vertical polygons with aligned textures. The DS port received a new 3D engine which allowed to use use arbitrary geometry, texturing, and lighting for the levels . Apart from engine upgrade, game received new features and enhancements.

Doom references

 * When starting a new game, you can choose the hardest "Nightmare" difficulty level. The game asks "Are you sure you want to die?" The player must choose either "Bring it on!" or "I'm too young to die..." (see Skill level) (not in the J2ME version)
 * Bruul the Orc chief tells the player, "prepare for your DOOM!"
 * Some art from Doom is reused in the game, for example, the wall texture in the hub level and the yellow floor lamp (similar to TREDB0 patch but recolored)