Discover Top Posts Tagged with #gear2neo

Designing Games for Smart Watches

I am an avid believer that smart watches will be the next big technology. I have had a Samsung Gear 2 Neo for half a year now and it has become an integral part of my everyday life. The utility of the apps you can run on it is already enough of a selling point, but of course the game designer in me wants to use it for entertainment purposes as well.

I've been looking over the Gear Store at the Entertainment section to see what kinds of games people are trying to make. Right off the bat, a large portion of these games are flappy bird clones, 2048 clones or one of those boring ancient games you see everywhere (Simon, tic tac toe, etc). There are a few interesting games where it looks like the developers tried really hard to make something unique, but I always see the same issues that are common to designing a game on such limiting hardware.

In this post, I discuss a few of the common problems I see and what styles of games would be much better suited for the target platform of smart watches.

Common Problems

The obvious issue in playing games on a watch is that the screen is so small. This isn't much of an issue in looking at the graphics of the game, but there is a problem trying to select/interact with game objects by tapping on them. If something on the top of the screen needs to be tapped, The rest of the screen is inevitably going to be blocked. The same goes for 2-finger tapping, but even more extreme. To build on two-finger tapping, it is physically impossible to tap 2 things within a a quarter of the screen of each other because your fingers will collide with each other! Because of these limitations, tapping should be limited to selecting or 1-time actions (like flying up in flappy bird). Expecting someone to be able to tap an area of the screen repeatedly AND see what is happening is expecting too much.

Device Benefits

Each brand of smart watch will probably have different hardware capabilities, but the Gear 2 has the following: camera, IR baster, heart rate monitor, vibration, accelerometer, pedometer. That's a lot to work with!

An even better approach to designing these games is to look at the purpose of the device and think of what types of games are suited to a similar purpose. Here's a brief list of reasons a person would want a smart watch:

Check the time, date, weather at any given moment

Instantly see personalized notifications

Monitor life activity (steps, sleep cycles, heart rate)

Convenient access to functionality (using the IR beam as a remote control for TVs, controlling the air conditioner, etc).

Breaking each of these down, we can look at styles of games that can be built off of this functionality:

The first two bullet hints that a user wants to be able to check information at a glance about their current situation. This lends itself very well to games where mechanics are running in the background independent of player action. For instance, farmville, cookie clicker, and tomogatchi would be perfect. These types of games allow a player to quickly and conveniently check their progress without needing to constantly interact with the game, take out their phone or sit at their computer. They can remain hands-free while occasionally looking at the screen and tapping to advance the game.

Another note about the personalized notifications, one neat side effect I noticed about smart watches is that the vibration is completely unobtrusive. Typically when a friend of mine receives a text, the vibration of their phone can be heard by everyone in the room and the phone is usually placed on the table for easy access. With a watch, only the wearer knows when it vibrates. This could be integrated into the previously mentioned timer-based games, or even some kind of social game where the vibration pattern tells the player information without the need to look at the screen and without other players being able to hear it.

The third bullet is a style of game that a lot of people have been working on. One of the senior projects at my school was a fitness game that leveled up characters based on how they walked. Nintendo's 3DS uses playcoins that accumulate based off on the amount a player walks in real life. With the watch counting steps and with its ability to read the wearer's heartrate, smart watches are a great platform for these types of games.

One interesting way I've seen the watch used before is as a controller for other games. The Gear 2 can only be synced to a phone, but future iterations will definitely change. Since the watch has an accelerometer and the touch screen can be treated as a joystick or a button, the watch as a whole can be used to control a game on a different screen without being restricted to the real estate of the watch face.

I've only really named a few styles of games that are perfect for the platform, but I guarantee there are more I haven't thought of. As smart watches become more popular when the iWatch and better AndroidWear watches released, novel game ideas targeted at the new hardware will be something to look out for, and I'm pretty excited.

If you can think of any cool game ideas that are best played on a watch and you feel like sharing, shoot me a message! I love hearing game ideas! Also, sorry for the lack of pictures! I couldn't really think of much to throw in here!

#gear2neo

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#gear2neo