We haven’t played wrist-mounted games since the days when we were wearing digital watches and velcro trainers. They were pretty simple devices, fiddly and inconvenient, but we can’t deny there was something a little magical about them. Being able to carry a game around with you on such a discreet device without anyone being the wiser (as far as you were concerned) had a certain thrill to it. A thrill perhaps usurped in modern times by the existence of the smartphone, a device that can carry tens of games around in your pocket, played by four-year-olds to 84-year-olds the world over. The smartphone, and at its spearhead the iPhone, has made us all gamers, but what might Apple's Watch add to gaming culture?
At first the answer might appear to be not much. It's a relatively small device, even if you spend the extra money to buy the 42mm version, and with 18 hours of battery life on the Sport model, it's not built for extended gaming, but that doesn't mean that developers have been scared away from taking a swing at it. There are a plethora of intrepid gaming pioneers looking to be the first to crack the Apple Watch gaming formula. But after years of making iOS games, how do you even go about designing a game to play on a watch?
“At first, we just blue-skied it," says Stephen Griffin, founder and CEO of Eyes Wide Games, releasing Watch This Homerun on Apple Watch. “Everyone on the team had a preconceived notion of what we would be able to do with the device. We knew it was going to have a small screen so we settled on doing a one-button/one-tap game early on." The result was a relatively basic baseball game experience. Small, simple and fast. A theme that was clearly going to develop as we looked deeper into gaming on the Apple Watch.
"Obviously the first thing we had to do, as with any device, is ask how do we make games for this, what's the way to approach this?” asks Vince Farquharson, COO of Bossa Studio, maker of Spy_Watch and perhaps more famously Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread. Bossa went about its process in quite a methodical, ground-up fashion. "What we did first was think about how people would use the Watch as opposed to phones. That's the closest analogy and before you’ve thought about it too much and you imagine it in your head, it’s about a phone game on a watch. That's the path of least resistance. But that's not actually the way to do it.”
Certainly, the idea of even trying to play Angry Birds on an Apple Watch seems fiddly and daunting. The real estate of the screen simply doesn't allow for that kind of interaction and, as Eyes Wide Games found out, the development kits don’t make things very easy either. “After starting to really play with the developer kit, it became clear that certain things were not going to be possible and most importantly the games were going to have to be composed differently," Griffin admits. “We then switched to a 'Hey, can this be built using the available Dev Kit?’ mindset. We built around seven or eight experiments and iterated on those to try and discover roadblocks and work arounds... We quickly learned that it wasn't going to be normal game development where it’s more like an open canvas bound by your programming ability and imagination. The Dev Kit doesn't really lend itself to game development."
For Bossa it was important to bring with it some of the lessons of what it was like developing for the iPhone back in the day and seeing that it’s not always the direct route that delivers the really eye-catching game ideas. “If you look at phones, for example, the way you play games on phones has kind of mapped itself to the way you do other things on that phone," says Farquharson. "Basically what you do with phones is that every hour or two you’re going to interact with it for a few minutes. That’s how you play games and it’s also how you do email and Facebook and everything else; it all kind of aligns itself with logical reasons."
This is the thought process that’s driven their design for Spy_Watch: “You look at the Watch and [think] ’How do people use these watches or watches in general?’ It’s something you probably look at once every 15-20 minutes for a few seconds. So what’s the right sort of game that maps itself to that usage behaviour every 15-20 minutes for a few seconds? And it doesn't take long to realise that there’s nothing. There isn’t actually anything like that, which is an interesting dilemma. You’ve got to think about not only making a game, but making a new type of game that can marry itself to a device that has a very different usage case. At that point we had to go to square one, we had to look at the device, look at the way that Apple was talking about it, look at where they've put their time and effort and what they've really made that device to do.”
And that's led rather interestingly to a spy game that plays out entirely in text via notifications. "Imagine the old style text adventure, but put into a modern app with spies,” adds Farquharson. “We described it the other day as WhatsApp meets James Bond, which is a pretty good way of describing it as well.”
But for both studios it has been an entirely new learning experience. While smartphones may have stumbled through a period of awfully-mapped virtual joysticks and inappropriately shoehorned-in first-person shooters, despite taking a little time to find their feet they did manage to find some classic genres to rest upon like point-and-click adventures and tower defence games. The processing power and architecture of those devices was robust and versatile. The Apple Watch appears to be a different egg to crack.
“In the end, we figured out how to build some sport games and a few other action scenarios using what I would normally consider to be hacks or tricks.” admits Griffin. “However, sometimes that's the only option you have. I guess games have always pressed the limits of their platforms and had to resort to tricks to make them play.” Where Bossa ended up in the early stages with the Apple Watch was just admitting it didn’t know what to do.
"Once we realised the way you use a watch is completely different to the way you use a phone, then we decided: we know nothing,” says Farquharson, refreshingly honest. “We’ve got a small screen, but what’s it really good at? It’s good at really crisp, nice iconographic style visuals. Notifications are really good. And we sort of did it like that, working out what it was good at. Then you had these puzzle pieces of notifications, being able to glance at it [in a way] that feels quite gadgety, it looks quite beautiful.”
“We anticipate that it won’t always be this way, but you do what you have to do to get a game ready for the launch of a new platform," adds Griffin. "You can't sit around and wait for the developer tools to be fun and fluid for building games.” And so we're in a melting pot phase where ideas are being experimented with. There are going to be some games that try to do too much and many that will do too little. At the moment we’re seeing a lot of second-screen apps for games, offering quick access to loadouts or tactics. It all rather begs the question, given a little time, what might the Apple Watch be really good at?
“It’s definitely the fact that it’s so readily available to the wearer. All they have to do is lift up their arm and play,' insists Griffin. “Because much of the startup friction is removed on the Apple Watch both technically and via design guidelines, you can now make games that only take 15 seconds to play but still link up with previous play sessions to form 5,10,15 minute experiences. We think it's going to lead to more play and enable the creation of completely new types of games.”
But it still isn't really a device meant for gaming. Its battery life and development kit speak to that. Bossa tested a lot of ideas trying to find formulas that would work to the devices strengths and not embellish its weaknesses. “We knew the specs and the battery considerations, and because of the way Apple designed it, the kind of interactions they imagined won't drain the battery, but the path of least resistance for game developers probably would be a path that would drain the battery,' reveals Farquharson. “We were very mindful of that. If you stick to the way Apple wants you to interact with it, you don’t hit the problem. If you try and go off piste with it you're going to start hitting these issues." So with several internal game jams to help foster new ideas the studio tested and tested and tested, finally combining a few of the ideas that emerged into this notification-based experience.
What's particularly interesting about this direction for Bossa in particular is that it's a studio that's become well known and loved for its irreverent humour and light, physics-based gaming experiences with plenty of challenge and depth beyond the surface hilarity. With Spy_Watch, on this tiny device, story has become the most important thing. “You drill down to what the device does best, which is messaging and conversations, and that leads you to story,” explains Farquharson. “If you don’t care about the story and you don't care about the characters, then you don't care about the game. We had to double down and invest in that.”
That said, it’s a device about intimacy and discretion. Two concepts beneficial to a new piece of technology, but not really compatible with the modern gaming obsession with sharing, upload and interacting with others. “It does very smart things like it knows when you're looking at it and it turns itself on and it knows when you're not looking at it and it turns itself off,” explains Farquharson. “It's simple things like this that are built into the DNA of the product that are not really about sharing the device.”
But, adds Farquharson colleague Rob Mackenzie, a designer at Bossa Studios, it could encourage a different kind of real-world interaction instead, more in line with story-driven experiences. “We do have procedural stories, so no two people will have exactly the same game. They will have had slightly different missions in traversing the main story, so if there is going to be any shareability it’s going to be the water-cooler moments of asking people what happened on their various missions. Beyond that it’s a pretty singular experience, but then so is the Watch."
Right now none of this feels like it’s going to tap into a Flappy Birds level of gaming hysteria, so does the Apple Watch have what it takes to break through on a viral level? “It’s only a matter of time before you have the next rogue sensation,” Griffin believes. “We actually think that for Apple Watch owners, the device will become their main casual gaming platform. It’s all about where a user spends their time. If they pull out their phone less because they only have to use their Apple Watch, then that’s where they will play. We foresee a movement of casual games away from mobile phones much like casual games moved from desktops to mobile devices.”
For Bossa it’s less clear, but once the gaming community gets its hands on the Apple Watch it seems to believe new ideas will rise fast. "Millions of people looking at something collectively is very smart and they can make good decisions about how you can evolve that product,” says Farquharson. “We're sending [Spy_ Watch] out there, we're hoping people will understand where we're coming from and why we’re doing it, they'll buy into that and we'll see what we can do in the future."
Griffin foresees the Apple Watch having a much larger impact on the entertainment world as it helps bind a wave of new tech together. “Aside from taking a huge cut of users away from mobile games as described earlier, we think it has a lot of potential for augmented reality games and providing more transparent ways for users to interact with responsive environments." he tells us. "With the onset of the Internet of Things and more specifically Apple's upcoming updates to Apple TV, HomeKit and CarKit, there's going to be a lot of opportunity for making the world more playful.
“The Apple Watch will sit at the crux of those systems because it will allow things like frictionless sign-in as well as a means to carry state between the different contexts. Once those technologies progress further, I’m sure we will find ways to misuse the tools to build games even more different than what we will see on the Apple Watch.”
Right now there’s definitely passion on the side of the developers, as they see which ideas capture our imaginations. "[Spy_Watch is] very different, and deliberately so, and maybe even a bit risky, but it’s something that comes from really buying into the platform," adds Farquharson. “It's intimate, it’s personal and it’s everything that Apple is talking about. It’s exactly what they’ve designed the Apple Watch for and in theory that should be a good match.”
Both teams have approached the Apple Watch in different ways, but ended up in similar positions, waiting and seeing what happens next while pushing what the device can do, in order to get ahead of the next wave of advancements. Can the Apple Watch be a true gaming device? With a little more power it might be able to deliver the quality and fidelity of experience and interface we crave, but it can’t be denied that the allure and magical pull of playing a game on such a discreet and personal device is strong. Whether we're pretending to be a spy or sneakily hitting a few balls out of the park, this is a new gaming device with real potential.