Gaming —

The promise—and massive challenge—of making games for the Apple Watch

How to make 15-second microgames with targets "the size of salad bar ham cubes"

<i>Trivia Crack</i> is one of a number of quiz games coming to Apple Watch. The simple gameplay of the genre makes it well suited to the small screen.
Trivia Crack is one of a number of quiz games coming to Apple Watch. The simple gameplay of the genre makes it well suited to the small screen.

When the iPhone was first announced in 2007, Apple didn't sell the pocket computer as a gaming device. Many observers were skeptical the smartphone would ever become an important part of the game industry, scoffing at its lack of physical buttons and limited hardware power compared to handhelds like Sony's PlayStation Portable. The App Store that would make games widely available on the device wasn't even available until the follow-up iPhone 3G, released one year later.

Of course, the iPhone (and its smartphone ilk) is one of the most important platforms in the gaming business today, with hundreds of thousands of titles ranging from casual megahits to hardcore console ports to indie darlings to forgettable shovelware and everything in between. The phone's role in the market has become so important that even Nintendo plans to start making smartphone games this year, competing directly with its own Nintendo 3DS titles.

This week, Apple officially launches the Apple Watch. Once again, gaming is not a marketing focus for this Apple device. Playing games doesn't even seem to be a particularly important use case for the hardware maker. The initial WatchKit SDK appears ill-suited to making games that take full advantage of the smartwatch, and the market for games played on a minuscule screen, while holding your wrist upright, is unproven to say the least.

All that hasn't stopped a number of developers, big and small, from seeking to get in on the ground floor of Apple Watch gaming. Despite the uncertainty, these developers see the Apple Watch as a potentially vibrant new market for gaming, perhaps as revolutionary and unique as the iPhone was when it came out.

"Right now we have all of our resources on [Apple Watch]," Stephen Griffin, CEO of Watch This Homerun-developer Eyes Wide Games, told Ars. "We're not casually doing it, it's not a little experimental dev team that's off to the side... I think it will transform [gaming] for every person who owns Apple Watch. All of their casual play will migrate there just like it migrated from casual browser games to mobile games. It's all about where their time is spent."

Early challenges

Talk to anyone working on games for the Apple Watch, and they'll tell you about all the kinds of games that don't seem to work on a tiny, wrist-mounted display. Many will tell you about the prototypes they've already tried and failed to effectively squeeze onto the device's 1.54" diagonal screen.

Console-style experiences like first-person shooters, racing games, or even simple 2D platform games are probably immediately out, though complex titles can have "companion apps" that allow for simple management or remote control through the watch. Even many games specifically designed for a small mobile phone screen end up less than satisfying on a tiny smartwatch, though. Precision swipes are difficult on a screen that small, and a single fingertip can easily block most or all of the action if it has to be held down. Developers said that simply pushing buttons on the small screen is surprisingly workable, however, even when users are "tapping on areas roughly the size of salad bar ham cubes," as WayForward Creative Director Matt Bozon described the actions in Watch Quest.

Aside from the inherent game design challenges of the radical new smartwatch format, early Apple Watch game developers are also struggling with an SDK that sometimes seems actively hostile to making games at this point. WatchKit, in its current form, is oriented toward creating extension apps that show basic information passed from a core app running on the iPhone over Bluetooth. The design language allows for only very simple interactions and interface elements like scrolling lists, stationary buttons, and static images. The more dynamic inputs used in many games feel left out, developers told Ars.

"Instead of being able to create complex view hierarchies which can be placed arbitrarily in the available space, we instead have to use an abstract system of grouping elements, stacking them together either horizontally or vertically, which makes custom interfaces more difficult to achieve as we lose fine grain control over the layout," Greg Plumbly, managing director of Hatchi-developer Portable Pixels, told Ars. Martin Pittenauer, co-founder of Rules-developer TheCodingMonkeys, put it in even simpler terms—Apple's SDK has flows for an app in mind. "If your game fits into these frameworks Apple provides, you don’t have any trouble."

If you're trying to create a traditional animated sequence for your Apple Watch game, you might also have some trouble. "Normally when you program a game, you do everything algorithmically for moving everything," Eyes Wide Games' Griffin explained. "[Here] you have to pre-render everything. You can still do interesting animations, but instead of at run-time dynamically figuring out where you want things to move, you have to organize your game experience to where you already know what all the possible moves are and render them out."

That's fine for the graphic novel-style visualizations in an RPG like Runeblade or the extremely simple sets of animations in tile-based puzzle games like Rules!. Game makers that want to show action more dynamic than a glorified slide show, though, are going to have to wait at least until a fuller Apple Watch SDK comes out later in the year. "It’s a technical constraint that plays into what you can do creatively," Griffin said.

Furthermore, some of the Apple Watch's most interesting and unique hardware features aren't yet accessible through the WatchKit interface. Developers that want to make use of the watch's Taptic Engine vibrations, heart rate monitor, digital crown, or accelerometer are stuck waiting for an SDK update, too.

Smaller screen, shorter games

A trailer for <i>Runeblade</i> shows some brief phone-based action amid a lot of concept art.
The hardware and SDK limitations mean the initial list of Apple Watch games in development tends heavily toward turn-based games with simple interactions, often ported directly from existing mobile titles. That includes a lot of puzzle games (Rules!, Boxpop), word games (Letterpad, Snappy Word), and RPG/adventure games (RuneBlade, Watch Quest). There are a few quiz games, card games, and virtual pet monitors thrown in for good measure.

Yet even games that are just miniature versions of their iPhone cousins have to be adapted somewhat to really work on a wrist-based platform. "On mobile platforms you can design for short to long interactions, but the accepted wisdom is that interactions on Apple Watch will be very brief," Nimblebit co-founder David Marsh said of the Apple Watch adaptation of Letterpad.

How brief? Going off of recommendations from Apple's usability guidelines, most every Apple Watch developer we talked to said they were aiming for gameplay sessions that hit a sweet spot of 10 to 15 seconds. At the very high end, a single Apple watch gaming instance could stretch for up to a single minute before arm fatigue and effects on battery life start to become potential issues, developers said. That means fundamentally redesigning even the kinds of stripped down games that are meant to be played in five-minute chunks on a smartphone. Think fewer mini-games, more WarioWare-style microgames.

In Watch This Homerun, for instance, an entire baseball game is distilled into 15-second sets of three rapid pitches—simply tap the ball with the correct timing and positioning to get hits. It might take an entire day to work through a full game in these small chunks, but you're never bothered for more than a few seconds at any one time.

Even a game like Rules!, which takes only a few minutes on an iPhone, has been broken down into 10 to 15 second "brain training"-style tests for the Apple Watch. "Raising your arm for five minutes is something you don’t want to do," TheCodingMonkeys' Pittenauer pointed out.

Channel Ars Technica