Category: Apple Developer News

The world of Lego Star Wars: Castaways contains many wonders — amazing animation, delightful storylines, and pitch-perfect physical comedy. Perhaps the most impressive among them, however, is this: If you had a big enough pile of bricks (and a big enough basement), you could build the whole game yourself.

Everything in the game — the massive array of ships, the mixed-and-matched characters, the expansive alien backgrounds, the planets floating in the distance, the docking bays, the outskirts of Jabba’s palace, and even new character Bossig the Hutt — is designed to be structurally sound and “Lego legit.”

“Every single brick you see, every Lego plate, connects the way it’s supposed to connect in the real world,” says Jacques Durand, the game’s creative director. Accuracy wasn’t enough for the Montreal-based game design studio Gameloft — this game had to be reproducible.

The challenge of physically recreating the entire game is maybe only a little more imposing than the one posed to the Gameloft team when they launched the development process: Design a console-worthy Apple Arcade game set in the Star Wars galaxy, evoke the boundless free-play spirit of Lego, merge sci-fi action with exploratory gameplay, and make the whole thing feel like playing with little pieces of plastic on your playroom floor.

“We wanted to make a game that let you mix and match as much as you want,” says Durand, who’s also a lifelong Star Wars fan and self-professed AFOL (adult fan of Lego). “If you want to customize your character with a Tusken Raider head on top of X-wing pilot suits with Boba Fett’s pants, you should be able to do that.”

In keeping with the improvisational spirit of Lego play, the action-adventure game is powered by a lack of boundaries. It’s all about exploring and battling through (sometimes unreliable) simulations set in the Star Wars galaxy; one minute you’re fighting off waves of stormtroopers with friends to protect Hoth’s Echo Base, the next you’re wielding the Force to not-so-gently nudge opponents off ledges in PvP arenas. The game’s place in the Star Wars timeline is unestablished, and its fun island-planet setting is new to the Star Wars galaxy. “It’s more [Gilligan’s Island] than Lost,” laughs Durand.

The island is designed as a kind of repository of Star Wars history, an elegant construct that allows the game to sporadically cross paths with the existing movies and shows — if it wants to. When the game does intersect with familiar scenes, they’re either a simulation brought on by a droid guide named TU-T0R, or entertainment for the pleasure of Bossig the Hutt, a Roman emperor-type kingpin who demands diversion.

“It gave us an incredible freedom to put content into the game without having to follow the timeline,” says Durand, “and it let us add more content, like a rancor pit or a Tatooine hangar.”

To create this galactic playground, Gameloft — in partnership with Lego and Lucasfilm Games — built the game around a few core principles. The first: The game should prioritize self-expression. After all, what better way to start off an all-new story than by creating an all-new character? “From the start, the message is, ‘You’re not playing as Luke or Leia,” says Durand. “You’re in a different location and in a different timeline. The experience of creating a character was at the core.”

You’re not playing as Luke or Leia. You’re in a different location and in a different timeline.

Jacques Durand, creative director

This included fully customizable in-game minifigs, which Durand likens to the build-your-own tables at IRL Lego stores, where you can rifle through drawers full of heads, torsos, and legs to assemble the proper avatar. “We often said to the team, ‘I want to feel like I can physically reach into the game and feel the plastic under my finger,’” says Durand.

The second and most important idea was that everything in the game — from the scorching sands of Tatooine to the craterlike surface of the Death Star — needed to feel just as real as its physical counterpart. From their Lego-littered offices, Gameloft ensured every environment looked hand-built. And they only needed two huge pieces of cutting-edge software to do it.

There had never been a game designed quite like Lego Star Wars: Castaways — but there had been a few movies. The Gameloft team drew heavily from the rapid-fire richly textured imagery of The Lego Movie and its equally effervescent sequel. “Everything is Lego in those movies, down to the backgrounds,” says Lee Kaburis, game manager for Lego Star Wars: Castaways. “We investigated the matter a little further, decided it was feasible, and said, ‘OK, we’re going all in.’ We wanted that full immersion of being in a Lego world.”

The catch: “Bricks are complex objects!” says Kaburis. “It takes a lot of processing power. So we had to figure out a way to be as efficient as possible so we could run not only on a device as big as an Apple TV, but also something as small as the older generation iPhone.”

To build the game elements, the team relied heavily on an adapted version of Lego Digital Designer. It’s very conveniently the exact same software Lego uses to create its own physical bricks — from single Lego Dots to this year’s ginormous Titanic — and the team employed it to imagine Lego versions of X-wings, brand-new Hutts, and one particularly tricky Corellian freighter.

The game’s version of the Millennium Falcon is based on the physical Ultimate Collector’s Series set — one of the largest Lego sets in history, with just over 7,500 pieces. “We really wanted players to be able to go beneath the Falcon and see not only the pieces but the Lego studs — and even the Lego logo on top of the individual studs,” says Durand.

But the more complex the shape, the more polygons you have to draw — and the Falcon’s polygons numbered in the millions. “When we first put the Falcon in, it immediately crashed the game,” laughs Durand. But the team persevered, and Gameloft’s performance engineers came on board for a tune up, creating a process to optimize the complex model without losing its visual detail.

When we first put the Falcon in, it immediately crashed the game.

Jacques Durand, creative director

Engineers used lighting to help identify the model pieces that were crucial to the game’s visual look and feel. As soon as something received initial build approval, the team ran it back through the machine to cast lights on it. Any surface that rebalanced that light was kept; every piece of the model that didn’t was removed from its geometry. Durand estimates that decision saved 90 percent of the work — and polygons.

While this process was perfect for man-made environments and objects, the team ran into challenges rendering scenes like the docking bay or the rough cliffs surrounding Jabba’s palace. “It just would have been [impossible] with thousands — or millions — of bricks,” says Kaburis.

Instead, anything too unwieldy for Lego Digital Designer went to a second piece of software — the ‘Lego-Lyzer’ — that read the scene, ship, building, or background and speedily produced a game-ready Lego replica. Durand and the team found it the perfect solution for the game’s backgrounds and more distant objects: “At that distance, you’re maybe not seeing Lego studs, but you’ll definitely see the edges of each brick.”

Once levels were built, the Gameloft team embraced constant playtesting in their weekly meetings. “The first 15 minutes were updates about progress, what everybody’s doing,” Kaburis laughs. “The last 45 minutes were playtime.”

Kaburis says playtime — which involved nearly everyone on the team — was the most important part of development. But the game’s most valuable playtesters were also its smallest: Kid playtesters helped the team refine the game’s perspective from an initial top-down perspective to a behind-the-ship point of view, and helped them develop and refine the onboarding process.

“The first time you play, you see a pop-up screen that says ‘Hold your tablet or phone with two hands,’” says Kaburis. “That’s because in a lot of the play tests, we saw kids putting the phone down and playing with one finger.”

The result is a game that balances the adventurous spirit of Star Wars with the tactile joy of a Lego set. “Nowadays, games have the ability to immerse you with story and audio and visuals that are akin to watching a movie,” says Kaburis. “I’ve always loved games that can do that.”

With Lego Star Wars: Castaways, he and his team made one — and brought balance to the Force.

STAR WARS © & TM 2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved.

Learn more about Lego Star Wars: Castaways

Download Lego Star Wars: Castaways on Apple Arcade

Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

Explore more of the 2022 Behind the Design series

It is a demonstrable fact of app development that most great ideas arrive in late-night diners.

At least, that’s how it went for Curtis Herbert — creator and mastermind behind the ski-tracking app Slopes. One evening during a winter trip to the Poconos, Herbert and some friends hit up a Denny’s for a late-night feast, where talk quickly turned to the day’s activities: Who was the fastest on the mountain? Who had the longest run? How far did the group ski in total?

In response to one of the questions, Herbert pulled out the skiing app he’d been using to track stats — and found the UX equivalent of a yard sale. The stats were there, but buried amidst graphs and maps; to find enough data to compare (and brag about, probably), Herbert had to cross-reference three screens and a table view.

“It was really well-engineered, but the UX left a lot to be desired,” says Herbert from his elevation-appropriate home in Boulder, Colorado. “They clearly had skiers on the team, but it felt like something got lost in translation… I thought, ‘You know, I can do better than this.’”

Herbert made good on his thought — and ten years of ski runs and late-night meals later, Slopes won an Apple Design Award for its remarkably accurate and comprehensive digital diary of your skiing day. The tracking app is a veritable mountain of data for skiers and snowboarders. It includes all the stats Herbert was seeking out over dinner: speeds, miles, and vertical drops, as well as the locations of your friends and family members on the mountain during runs. It’s all done automatically using GPS on iPhone and Apple Watch, and it’s presented in a crisp, concise design that speaks to the sport.

“Runners have Runkeeper, Nike Training Club, and Strava for keeping stats, but when I started, there just wasn’t much for skiers,” says Herbert. “There was even less that felt part of the skiing community. I needed an app written by a skiier or snowboarder. And I wanted it to feel as human as possible.”

That human factor is part of what helps elevate Slopes beyond simple stat tracking. Rather, the app affords skiers of all levels — from beginners on their inaugural bunny slopes to the human rockets on double black diamonds — a way to quantitatively gauge themselves via rich performance metrics. Or, to put it simply: It tells you how much better you’re getting.

“It’s really easy to overwhelm with stats,” says Herbert, who’s known as “The Slopes Guy” on the mountain. (Meeting him IRL is an in-app achievement that scores you a special pin.) “You really have to pick what matters to tell the story. I designed Slopes to be as human as possible because I view it as a journal for your memories. Sure, you’re gonna faceplant a few times. But when you get to your first intermediate run, and then to your first advanced run, you become the hero of your own story.”

‘You can tune out the world’

The story of Slopes involves several regions that aren’t mountainous and several seasons that aren’t winter. Herbert hails from the suburbs of Philadelphia, an area not exactly known for its soaring mountain ranges. Strictly speaking, he was a programmer before he was a skier. (“My seventh-grade math teacher gave me a programmable TI calculator because she was annoyed me with interrupting class all the time,” he laughs). But he’s been on the mountains since he was a Boy Scout, first on skis and then on a snowboard. “You can reach a real Zen state out there,” he says. “You’re paying attention to your body. You’re paying attention to the environment. You can be reflective and tune out the world.”

On flat land, Herbert found his way into web development and then app design, taking quickly to Objective-C and Swift. He knocked around corporate and consulting work and kicked around a few of his own ideas, but nothing really clicked. “I always had the itch to write my own app, but I figured it would never be worth it,” he says. “Plus, I’m pretty critical of my own ideas.”

Even after the Poconos diner, Herbert sat on Slopes for months, drawn to the idea but unsure how to make it profitable. He finally took the plunge in April 2013, but quickly encountered a significant scheduling issue: There’s not usually a lot of snow on the mountain in April, which makes it difficult to test skiing apps. Happily, a workaround presented itself. “My beta testers were mountain bikers,” Herbert says. “Resorts open up to them in the summers, so I just asked a couple of friends, “Hey, can you keep a phone in your pocket while you ride?” Herbert’s ad-hoc beta testing team hauled their bikes up on the lifts, then rode them down the pathways of the once-and-future ski runs. “One of the first things I did was write a harness where I could replay data on my computer,” he says. “Then it was: How do I break it up? How do I present it?”

The app remained a side hustle until 2015, when Herbert switched to a subscription model and started noticing downloads picking up. Spurred by the new traction, Herbert made Slopes his full-time job — and dug back into the design. “I’ve put the app through the wringer,” he says. “I need to make sure it’s easy to use in the real world, not just at my desk.”

‘I get to cheat’

Creating designs for your hobby can be a huge time-saver.

“I get to a cheat a little because I’m the snowboarder, designer, developer, and product manager,” Herbert says. “Snowboarders or skiers might not necessarily know what’s possible from a technical perspective, and engineers might just try to go the default way.”

It’s helped that Herbert’s evolution as a snowboarder has mirrored the app’s growth. “I’m fortunate in that I only started snowboarding 10 years ago,” he says. “It’s a recent enough memory that I can put myself in the shoes of beginners. I mean, you’re going downhill at 30 or 40 miles per hour — and that’s intimidating! And I can remember, ‘OK, this is where people just getting into the sport might struggle,’ or ‘Here’s a thing that made me feel really good.’”

Still, a skiing app presents a novel set of challenges, both technical (How do you ensure the GPS is accurately reporting your true location and speed?) and practical (How do you tap a screen while wearing puffy gloves in sub-zero temperatures on a flying bench?).

“The design of Slopes is very much informed by the situation,” he says. “For a lot of apps, you’re at your desk, or in a car, or on the train… on a lift, you’re 100 feet up. You don’t necessarily want to pull your phone out and fumble with it. So for me, there has to be a lot of thought about: What are the main interactions that really need to happen, and what device is the best to do that with?”

The iPhone app’s record button, for instance, is mirrored on the Apple Watch app, which is more accessible on a lift or in a line. “A lot of interaction design is thinking holistically about the ski experience,” he says. “To me, having a great experience means: Does the thing on screen react the way I’d expect it to? Can I physically interact with this digital concept? Does it feel real?… Not in a skeumorphic way, but in a ‘can-I-manipulate-it?’ way.”

On a lift, you’re 100 feet up. You don’t necessarily want to pull your phone out and fumble with it.

Curtis Herbert

Beyond Slopes’s people-friendly interface and powerful stat-tracking, Herbert is particularly proud of the app’s 3D mapping support for resorts and runs. “Skiers and snowbarders think in 3D,” he says. “Going into this, one of my big ideas was the ability to look back at my runs and see the 3D profile. I don’t want to have to assemble the puzzle. I want to see, ‘Oh, here’s where I went really fast,’ or, ‘Here was that really steep turn.’”

The skiing apps he’d used prior to creating Slopes only offered top-down or side-profile views, which was workable — but ultimately lacking. In part, there simply weren’t great data sets for resorts, runs, and lifts.

So Herbert turned to GPS data to help. He’d already planned to offer the full Slopes experience even if someone only had GPS enabled, as cellular connectivity could be dicey in the backcountry. “[So] we had to figure out how to pull that data and translate in 3D,” he says. With no 3D experience to speak of, Herbert taught himself SceneKit to create the feature.

This summer — nearly a decade later — Herbert and the growing Slopes team are expanding their mapping offerings to help you better locate your friends and family during a ski trip; with an Apple Maps-esque interface, the app will show you the routes — easy and hard ones — between you and your friends.

Here again, the human element comes into play. “There can be a lot of intimidation about going somewhere for the first time,” he says. “You might look at a map and say, ‘Am I gonna be able to get back here? Am I gonna end up going off a cliff on a double-diamond?’ I think this’ll take the edge off for a lot of people.”

In recent years, Herbert and the team have focused more on those collaborative features to bring people together. “I hear from a lot of families who’ve used it to get their sons or daughters into skiing. I’ll hear about people trying to beat their mom at a top speed — and I don’t encourage racing on the mountains! — but it’s fun to hear that it’s bringing families together.”

(It can also bring you closer to the developer; Herbert makes his location public when skiing; you can find him to say hi and get that pin. “It’s basically Where’s Waldo,” he says with a grin. “It makes for good stories.”)

But it turns out that goes for his own family too. “My niece recently learned to ski at Killington, so I said, ‘Here, put this phone in your pocket.’ And she lit up at the end of the day, like ‘Look how far I went!’ It’s hard to get that perspective until you see it with numbers on a map, especially if you did much more than you thought. Hearing that it brings people together at the end of the day, sitting around the fire comparing stats, making a sport that I love more enjoyable to people — that’s the best stuff.”

Learn more about Slopes

Download Slopes from the App Store

Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

Explore more of the 2022 Behind the Design series

August 9, 2022

Connect with experts online to learn how to make the most of App Store features. Discover how to attract new customers, test marketing strategies, add subscriptions, and so much more. Live presentations with Q&A are being held throughout August in multiple time zones and languages. Register today if you’re a member of the Apple Developer Program.

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Marvel Future Revolution pulls off a balancing act that’s nothing short of heroic.

Netmarble’s open-world superhero MMORPG is a massive Marvel mashup that unites heroes and villains from all universes, timelines, and realities for a giant free-for-all. The cast of characters is nothing short of epic — all-timers like Captain America, Iron Man, and Black Widow join cult favorites like the Egyptian god-avatar Moon Knight, feisty rodent Rocket Raccoon, and floating noggin M.O.D.O.K. Open interdimensional portals as Doctor Strange or crush enemies with Captain Marvel’s mighty photon blasts; play out a story or toggle on auto-play mode.

For Netmarble production director Joe Lee, staffing the ultimate comic-book all-star game was only half the battle. For his game to be truly revolutionary, Lee and his team knew they needed to level up the gameplay mechanics, storyline, and visuals. After all, with great power comes… well, you know.

“The goal was to bring the full superhero experience to the widest possible audience,” says Lee. “Marvel has such a huge crowd and so many different characters. We needed to find our own big tweak, the thing that would get us to stand apart from everybody else.”

Lee speaks with pride about the game’s range — how its characters intermingle and cross dimensions, and how it truly stretches across the Marvel universe. Future Revolution begins in New Stark City, a gleaming metropolis patrolled by reportedly friendly Ultrons. Before long, however, you’re off exploring realms like Midgardia (a fantasy land reminiscent of Thor and Loki’s homeworld) and Xandearth (a war zone full of alien tech). But despite its grand scope, the game’s multiversal chaos, galaxy-snapping enemies, and feisty rodents are grounded in one single design principle — something that’s driven the team from the begininng: “In a game like this, when you’re making big, important decisions, you always have to just go back to your common sense.”

‘I live to be a clown’

Lee broke into the game industry nearly two decades ago on the business development side, where he learned the ins and outs of partnering with big companies like Marvel — but before his impressive career, the lifelong gamer and business pro had a different passion: hip-hop dancing.

“I think I live to be a clown,” laughs Lee from Netmarble’s offices in South Korea. “I like to bring a good time to the people around me. The greatest part about dancing is that you’re trying to make other people happy, but the happiest person in the moment is yourself. I think that’s maybe why I got into games.”

It’s paid off: Games have driven his entire career. In the mid-2010s, Lee became production director for Marvel: Future Fight, a role-playing dungeon crawler and something of an ancestor to Future Revolution. The game was — and is — a smashing success, one that just celebrated its seventh anniversary. “When you’re dancing, you’re performing for couple dozen or maybe a hundred people,” says Lee. “When I started out, I thought, ‘If I want to be a clown, I’d rather serve the bigger crowd.’ And in games, you’re working for millions. That’s what I live for.”

While Future Fight’s impact was becoming clear, Lee was already brainstorming for the sequel. “We were always thinking, ‘What if we had a better framework? What if we could use more recent technologies?’” he says. “We had a yearning for something bigger.”

We wanted to convince core fans first.

Joe Lee, Netmarble production director

In Lee’s mind, the potential sequel would elevate the superhero experience as much as humanly possible. “We thought, ‘OK, to give a true superhero experience to the player — all the powers from the comic books, all the experiences from the movies — we need a bigger space,” he says. “And if we’re talking bigger space, maybe it’s open world. And what’s the most suitable genre for that? MMORPG.”

Big stakes, but common sense. The team’s next challenge involved crafting a story that paid homage to Marvel’s epic history, served as a gripping narrative in its own right, drew on familiar heroes and planets and powers, and would find the approval of both hardcore fans and newcomers.

“We wanted to convince core fans first,” he says. “We wanted every setting to actually make sense. And we needed, say, multiple Captain Americas and Scarlet Witches playing side-by-side with each other. That’s how we landed on the convergence.”

The “convergence” provided an elegant solution to the story issue — if you can call multiple realities and multiple Earths colliding with each other a solution. Powered by multiversal magic and some good old-fashioned comic book logic, the convergence storyline not only allowed an endless stream of battles but also established a world in which Iron Man can fly through a portal and talk to Other Iron Man without either of them batting an eye (such as it is).

Plus, it was a total sandbox. Marvel Future Revolution scenes could take place pretty much everywhere. (The script is credited to Marc Sumerak, who worked on Future Fight.) It also allowed for chaos — the best kind. “There’s a mode called Omega War that finds all these heroes fighting each other in a group,” says Lee. “Why would they do that? Because they’re actually getting prepared for something bigger that’s coming.”

The ‘flashiest superhero game’

To pick the game’s heroes — a sort of gym-class dodgeball draft with some of history’s greatest comic-book characters — Lee and his team relied again on common sense. “With the characters, it’s about what the game needed,” says Lee, “not necessarily what was new.”

Selecting and plotting characters — the most crucial aspect of the game’s design — was more about filling holes than drafting the biggest IP; the key was to balance the various mathematical formulas that power such games while also offering players fantastic characters to play.

“When we’re adding a character, we’ll think, ‘OK, we already have a few sorcery characters and damage dealers — maybe we need a close-quarter character?” says Lee. “But also: If we already have Doctor Strange, do we need Wanda Maximoff too? In that sort of case, we’ll add special tweaks, based on the source material, to even things out.” The game’s version of the good Doctor is more about damage dealing, while its Wanda — with her well-documented reality-bending abilities — is more geared toward crowd control.

“We defined visual direction for the characters first: a photorealistic style that could compete with AAA games,” says Netmarble executive producer Doohyun Cho. Some characters have a lean, sleek look, while others come off more sturdy and rough. Each costume has a number of player-controlled variants, too: Prefer Black Widow with an all-black or magenta-streaked uniform? Go for it. Want Captain America with a scary-looking shield with menacing spikes? Make it happen.

“The ‘flashiest superhero game’ was our internal motto,” Cho says. “We wanted to see heroes being heroes, instead of being stationary and repeating similar moves over and over again.” Future Revolution superheroes attack and slash, duck and evade, fly and crash back to the ground again.

There were a few twists to consider, like the mix of airborne and non-airborne characters. “Flying is surely a bonus when it comes to gameplay, but we wanted to even out the benefits,” says Cho. Ground-based characters are highly maneuverable; Captain America, for instance, can super-sprint while Magik can teleport — both helpful skills when you’re fending off wave after wave of malfunctioning flying Ultrons.

Flying is surely a bonus when it comes to gameplay, but we wanted to even out the benefits.

Doohyun Cho, Netmarble executive producer

The team took pains to avoid “throwing too much information on the screen, as all game developers should.” But at the same time, hiding information behind menus would have forced players to go through multiple levels of hierarchy — also not a great experience. “We decided to balance by selecting information players would need to be constantly aware of,” says Cho. “Most of that is combat-sensitive information, like, health, skill button, and guard status.”

When it came time to design the map, the team started small. “It’s a pretty huge map,” laughs Lee, “and we wanted to see the target quality as soon as possible. So we’d start by focusing on a small corner of the map, one landmark, one enemy and maybe one NPC.” From there, they’d sketch out the combat and drop in some dialogue. Once that was settled? “It pretty much goes out the window,” laughs Lee. “By the time we’re done, we’ve evolved so much. But at least we got the vision of, ‘OK, this is what we’re expecting.’”

For those finding their way around the game — or those who’d prefer to watch the battles unfold — Future Revolution offers an auto-play mode, a concept that was also a frequent topic of conversation in the offices. “Auto-play can be a tricky thing,” says Cho. “Some may see it as robbing the real gameplay experience, while others see it as a convenient feature. But for a game like this that requires players to play for a long time, we thought some people would find it useful.”

The feature had two internal rules: First, manual play had to be a great, fully-featured option for players. Second, when players had auto-play enabled, there still had to be room for them to manually intervene and make a difference — where and when to evade, for instance, or when to unleash an ultimate skill. “All games need to be easy to learn but hard to master,” says Cho. “Even with auto-play on, you’ll need to find your own way of mastering auto and manual play combined!”

‘Here we were, contradicting the golden rule’

This brings us to the opening mini-movie — a prologue that features a massive city battle, multiple flying villains, dramatically-arriving heroes, and a surprising sacrifice. “We wanted to wow players from the get-go,” says Cho.

That said, Lee noted that including the scene was an early topic of debate amongst the team. “One of the most common-sense rules when designing a game is to get to the meat of the experience as soon as possible,” he says, “And here we were, contradicting the golden rule!”

Rather than focus on gaming conventions, however, the Netmarble team strove to consider the big picture — particularly the army of well-conditioned Marvel fans who’d be coming to the game with elevated expectations. “When you’re creating this kind of game, you know it’s going to appeal to a huge crowd,” he says. “We thought about what our audiences would be like, and what they would expect and deserve. And we thought it was essential to have a proper intro to a world that they’d hopefully [be] diving into at least a few hours every day,” he adds.

The opening scene’s story twist wasn’t simply meant to draw people in; it also brought weight to the experience. And that’s what it’s all about, says Lee. “A great game has to have emotional moments… It has to be the great time you’re having. It could be the feeling of defeating a huge boss that you weren’t able to beat for the first four or five rounds. Maybe it’s the reward you get after getting the sweet, sweet victory you achieved. Maybe it could be the sum of all the rewards.”

These moments elevate Future Revolution to create a truly super experience for its players — and the Netmarble team is still hard at work to make the game even better. “Everyone here is a Marvel nerd now,” Lee says.

Learn more about Marvel Future Revolution

Download MARVEL Future Revolution from the App Store

Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

Explore more of the 2022 Behind the Design series

Apple Entrepreneur Camp supports underrepresented founders and developers of app-driven organizations as they build the next generation of cutting-edge apps and helps form a global network that encourages the pipeline and longevity of these entrepreneurs in technology.

Apply now for one of three online cohorts for female, Black, or Hispanic/Latinx founders starting in October 2022. Attendees will receive code-level guidance, mentorship, and inspiration with unprecedented access to Apple engineers and leaders. Applications close on August 24, 2022.

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Max Frimout is an audio engineer for Odio, and it’s his job to transport you and your ears to a different world.

From his home studio in the Netherlands — stocked with keyboards, instruments, and a tangle of wires and boards more suited to a ‘50s B-movie than a cutting-edge audio app — Frimout creates the inventive 3D soundscapes that helped Odio secure its 2022 Apple Design Award.

“I want to create a different sensation in the space around me,” says Frimout. “Sometimes that can be airy and comforting; sometimes it’s way sweeter than I am, or more melodic than I imagine. In the end, it has to be interesting — but also easy to ignore.”

Like Frimout, Odio strikes a perfect balance between cutting-edge tech and artistic resolve. The app employs a mesmerizing mix of Spatial Audio and head-tracked audio to conjure up its chill AR soundscapes, which can be everything from a rushing forest waterfall to a buzzy digital atmosphere. “Turn on your soundscape, put in your AirPods, and you’re there,” says the app’s designer, Roger Kemp.

But you’re no passive listener in these realistic realms: You can manipulate every soundscape within the app through a clever system of sliders that help you reposition sonic elements — like a babbling river, dreamy whale song, or wash of digital static — around your head. Want the waterfall behind you? Just slide the arc backward. Want to hear the crisp, calming sizzle of Frimout’s digital artistry above all else? Bring that arc control to the center.

Odio is geared to two different audiences, says Kemp, who co-founded Volst, the app’s Netherlands-based studio. “We have people who say, ‘I just want to zone out, get into the flow, or sleep better… But we also have creators who want to make this their own.”

From the very beginning, Volst sought to make Odio work well for both groups. “We try to make it so everybody, with a little effort, can work on the app,” says Kemp. “The bare essence is basically a blank canvas where the artist and listener can do whatever they want with a soundscape.”

Kemp didn’t start out as a designer. He initially went to school for architecture in the Netherlands, then spent the ‘90s building websites and CD-ROMs — where he found a shocking number of similarities. “You navigate through a building, and you navigate through a website or an app,” he says. “You have an entrance and an exit. You have different rooms, views, and features. It’s the same with an app.”

Kemp spent eight years in the Bay Area before returning to the Netherlands to explore a career as a freelancer. “A lot of it was fun, but some major projects got really frustrating,” he says. “I wanted to work on something meaningful, and after a while I thought, ‘I might as well put all this energy into my own company.’”

Odio was partly the product of serendipitous timing. Joon Kwak, a design student from South Korea who had created a spatialized sound app in Unity for his graduation project, reached out to Kemp for a consultation. “We’d been looking for projects in the visual audio realm, and we loved it. Within two or three weeks, we had a working concept demo of a spatial environment where you could move sounds around.” Kemp stops to laugh. “That was the easy part.”

We thought, ‘What if we have musicians compose their own environments?’

Roger Kemp, Volst founder

The hard part was all the other apps doing the same thing. “We thought, ‘If this is so easy, there must be other apps like it.’ And there were!” says Kemp. “That’s when Max came along and said, ‘OK, how do we make something really special out of this?”

Frimout, who knew Kemp and others from the local nightlife scene, had the idea to focus less on nature sounds — the chirping birds, crackling fires, and rushing winds that tend to populate ambient sound apps — and put the emphasis instead on human creativity. “We thought, ‘What if we have musicians compose their own environments?’ Why not create a new platform for artists to publish their work?” says Kemp. “That’s when it all clicked.”

Frimout already had a bit of experience with spatialized audio. In addition to his music work, he’s studying electroacoustic composition at the Institute of Sonology in the Hague. Appropriately enough, he spoke with us from what he calls the “most advanced wavefield synthesis system in the world,” surrounded by boxes that contain 26 tweeters and two subwoofers — a massive setup designed to recreate big spaces in a smaller one. The place is full of archaeological recording equipment too — it has its roots in a Philips lab that played home to early experiments with electronic music.

Frimout, one of the app’s five composers, begins creating his Odio soundscapes on instruments or analog equipment in a manner that’s not too different from his day (well, night) job. Start with a base, create a mood, build on it, patch it all together. The only difference: the 3D configuration.

That patching is done in Logic Pro, with which he can position the channels in real time and test the results on his AirPods Max. “That’s how I look around to see how it feels three-dimensionally,” he says, rotating his head around for emphasis, “and it’s where I start to play around.” The results are effects and flourishes with names like “synthetic water,” “moving chords,” and “filtered drone,” all of which can be muted, amplified, or rotated as the user sees fit.

Inspiration comes from anywhere. Listen close and you can hear analog touches — like Frimout’s largely unrecognizable harp, Heartbreak. (“It’s just three chordal structures,” he says with a laugh, “but they’ve been processed and processed and processed.” ) The Institute is full of vintage equipment from the ‘50s, ’60s, and ‘70s that can be used to conjure up abstract, weirdly nostalgic riffs and fuzzes and sounds. “I like to take some of these ideas from the past and translate them,” he says. “Basically, I fiddle around until I hear something I like.”

The app is also a visual feast, with each soundscape accompanied by ever-shifting original art and cutting-edge visuals inspired by something as analog as it gets — the humble album cover. “They’re small books!” Kemp says. “With all their artwork and lyrics, they were a complete package. We thought, ‘Well, why not approach it that way? Why not have a visual artist work with a composer to create that complete package?’”

The final design — like every Odio soundscape and feature — is the result of significant back and forth, a strategy Kemp calls “ping-ponging the design.” “We’ll work on something for a few days, then take it to the whole team for a critique,” he says. Sometimes it takes one step; sometimes it can be four or five. “But in the end,” he says, “we get a result everybody likes.”

To be fair, Kemp wasn’t initially sold on that approach. “I thought this would be really hard!” he says. “People could be critiquing your work before it’s even finished. But we’ve found that it speeds up the procress tremendously. And we’ve been doing it now for three or four years.”

Odio publishes new soundscapes every month; their artist roster includes composers from Germany, Korea, and elsewhere. The plan is to keep expanding — partly because that’s what Kemp is cut out to do.

“The most challenging part of design for me is knowing when to stop, when to leave something alone and stop tinkering with it,” he says. “I always think, ‘Maybe if I change the color or stroke width, it’ll be better. But at a certain point you have to stop because the project is done. It’s published.”

He pauses to laugh. “But I still go back to designs and try to tinker. And the team tells me, “No! Don’t do it! It’s done!”

Learn more about Odio

Download Odio from the App Store

Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

Explore more of the 2022 Behind the Design series

Live Activities help people stay on top of what’s happening in your app in real time, right from the Lock Screen. You can now get started with Live Activities and the new ActivityKit framework, which are available in the beta 4 version of iOS 16.

Please note that Live Activities and ActivityKit won’t be included in the initial public release of iOS 16. Later this year, they’ll be publicly available in an update and you’ll be able to submit your apps with Live Activities to the App Store.

Learn more about Live Activities and ActivityKit

July 26, 2022

Get ready to connect with experts online to learn how to make the most of App Store features. Discover how to attract new customers, test marketing strategies, add subscriptions, and so much more. Live presentations with Q&A will be held throughout August in multiple time zones and languages. Register today if you’re a member of the Apple Developer Program.

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View schedule

Lots of games defy easy explanation, but Wylde Flowers is a particularly rare bloom.

This charming Apple Design Award-winning game is a cross-pollination of farming simulation, eerie mystery, optional love story, and exploration of tolerance and understanding.

Also, you’re a witch who sometimes turns into a cat.

“The Wylde Flowers experience is a bit different for everybody,” says Amanda Schofield, the co-founder, creative director and managing director of indie developer Studio Drydock. “It’s all about self-expression and self-exploration.” And as the game elegantly shifts from cozy sim to curious mystery — and introduces a gratifyingly diverse cast of characters — that experience transforms, too.

Wylde Flowers is set in the idyllic town of Fairhaven, a pastoral little hamlet where everyone knows everyone (for reasons the game turns into a winking challenge) and the most urgent menace appears to be the rotting boards blocking the entrance to an old mine.

Fairhaven — and Schofield — make your welcome as comfortable as an old cardigan. You play as Tara, a young woman who’s fled the city after a tough breakup to recharge and reconnect with her Grandma Hazel — who keeps secrets of her own but whose love for Tara radiates from the first cutscene. “The first thing we do is literally wrap you in a warm hug from Grandma,” says Schofield. “That’s the personality of the game. We’re saying this is a safe space, where things are they way they should be. I think that’s quite needed at the moment.”

Once in town, however, who Tara is — and what she becomes — is entirely up to you. Your in-game decisions shape the direction of her friendships, possible love life, and farming skills. Serendipitous interactions move the story along; bump into the gregarious bartender Damon or the flirty doctor Amira at the right moment, and you might change your plans (or unlock a special cutscene or quest). In that early conversation with Grandma, you even decide who Tara broke up with.

Such inclusivity is certainly intentional; townsfolk like the non-binary butcher Kim and the married couple Angus and Francis play key roles in the story and date back to the game’s earliest prototypes. Yet at the same time, Wylde Flowers isn’t a game that strives to make its points. “The LGBTQ+ characters aren’t defined by their queerness,” says Studio Drydock marketing lead Victoria Kershaw. “It’s a part of who they are, but it’s not their story arc. In Fairhaven, everyone is accepted as human beings.”

In that way, Fairhaven mirrors the ethos of Studio Drydock itself. “We’re creating a game for young women in a formative part of their lives, women who are dealing with problems that they might not necessarily have the tools to broach,” Schofield says. “We wanted to show them a world where all their choices could be accepted. So we didn’t need to make a story about people trying to find acceptance. Let’s just assume this place has evolved past that.”

While Wylde Flowers kicks off with a Tara making Grandma a nice mushroom risotto, things, as they say, escalate quickly. Without giving too much away, the story soon takes a peculiar turn, one that involves a dark forest with a mysterious gate, a shady-looking company of hooded figures in masks, curiously specific plant requests, and a cat that just keeps showing up. “We needed the story to be a slow-boiling frog,” Schofield says.

We needed you to walk in and feel comfortable, but we didn’t want you to think you were just playing a farming game.

Amanda Schofield, creative and managing director

A farming sim that also includes rebound relationships, undisclosed trapdoors, 30 chatty characters, and a sprinkling of witchcraft is not exactly a simple undertaking; Schofield jokes that the game’s script is “just a little bit longer than War and Peace.” The game’s tone was the subject of daily discussion: Was it dark enough? Was it cozy enough? Did the mystery unfold at the right cadence, and did it pair with that warm welcome? “We needed you to walk in and feel comfortable,” says Schofield, “but we didn’t want you to think you were just playing a farming game.”

That script fell first to Desiree Cifre, the game’s narrative director. Cifre signed onto the game a few months into development — the protagonist had a backstory, but (at the time) no name. “We made the choice to have a designed character,” says Cifre. “We wanted her to have specific depth in her backstory.” Cifre calls it a controversial choice. “But we felt it would ultimately give us more freedom in helping the players decide what kind of Tara their Tara is,” she says.

Much as finding the tone was a balancing act, Tara’s story needed to hit some consistent marks. “Often, I’m brought onto a project at the end, after they’ve decided on the design. It’s basically creating narrative reasons for why the design is the way it is,” says Cifre, with a laugh. “With this, Amanda’s design was developed in tandem with the narrative, which is why is works so well.”

To begin sketching out the narrative, Schofield drew on her past experience as a senior producer on Sims FreePlay, where she had helped add a “story arc” to the game’s famous open-world structure. “My epiphany was that people love making their own stories, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like engaging with other handcrafted stories too,” she says.

The initial draft came quickly. Cifre — alongside co-writer Elizabeth Ballou, who was brought in midway through production — wrote for a world that had “a foot in fantasy” but stayed close to the human element. “We didn’t want something that was arch or twee,” Cifre says, “but we wanted to tell players, ‘It’s OK for you to get really invested in these people.’”

The game would be a farming sim with a malleable storyline that prized inclusivity and acceptance. To do that, the studio needed a way to tell a story about prejudice without necessarily targeting a particular group — and still match the game’s vibe. They found their answer in an unlikely set of headlines. “We got the idea to focus on witchcraft while watching an election in the United Kingdom,” she says. “A group of individuals had decided to hex the government as part of their campaign. It seemed like an appropriate idea for us.”

It was appropriate on a number of levels. “Historically, [the witchcraft label] has been applied to groups — predominantly women — that people were afraid of,” Schofield says. “It’s been applied to healers, to people who have deep connections with the Earth. There’s always been an element of distrust for powerful women who are able to do things other people don’t understand.” Cifre dove into the literature of witchcraft, infusing the story with a melting pot of history and mythology drawn from Russia, South Africa, Iran, and more.

In addition to core plot points, the script had to allow for enough agency in a player’s choices so that they could feel ownership over the direction of the story. Tara needed to be sincere and irreverent but also a little lost, adrift after the loss of her job and relationship. Her experience discovering the town — and being “gobsmacked” by her new reality, as Cifre puts it — mirrors the player’s experience. Serendipitously, the character, town, and game grew together.

And then, there was the cat.

“OK, so everyone in the studio is cat-obsessed,” says Schofield. “We have whole channels of pictures of cats. Honestly, the cats in the game were the most critical things to get perfect.” (She’s kidding — probably.)

There was just one kitty-catch: The lone non-cat person in the room was Mike Taylor, a 20-year game design veteran — and the animation director charged with bringing them to life. “Mike probably had the most stressful job in the game,” Schofield laughs. “We’d have meetings with 25 people telling him, ‘No, this is how the cat should sound! More real! But also more cozy!”

She laughs. “If you’ve never been in a video call with 25 people meowing, it’s something.”

Schofield and Studio Drydock co-founder Alex Holkner first conceived of Wylde Flowers with a team of about a dozen, plotting out a snappy narrative that mirrored the “spring” section of the game. But after the initial development phase, they found the game expanding fourfold. “You know that meme with the red strings all over the wall?” she says. “That’s what our hires looked like after that first year.”

“No studio goes into their first game saying, ‘Let’s build the biggest game we’ve all ever done!’” Schofield laughs. “As a producer, I’m supposed to manage scale creep.”

But the team’s passion rendered her pleasantly powerless — something was clearly happening. Ideas came from anywhere: Cifre pitched a character whose feet are backwards, concept artists furnished quests. Cultural consultants were brought in to ensure dialect and dialogue were accurate and respectful, sometimes changing a word or two of the script or even redrawing entire dwellings.

“The animator would come in and say, ‘Look, I made this character’s hair move dynamically in the wind,’ and then the character artist would see it and say, ‘Well jeez, now I have to make the hair look better,’” she says. “It wasn’t competition. It was everyone wanting to meet a standard.”

All told, Wylde Flowers has about 18 hours of dialogue, 350 cutscenes, and 230 names in the credits. (To be fair, that last figure does include the orchestra.) Reaching those figures took about three years. Early game designs experimented with a top-down view (the better for mobile play), but Drydock quickly determined that play felt too disconnected from the characters, especially in a game with so much acting. Subsequent versions brought the view down to an angle — and would zoom in and in until it got as close to the characters as it could.

The scaled-way-up game’s story and visuals were taking shape, the growing team was deeply invested, and the town of Fairhaven was coming slowly to life. There was just one thing missing: its citizens.

Schofield had been noticing the degree to which game studios were bringing in voice actors, especially the K-pop or J-pop stars turning up in games produced in Asia. The voices, she knew, were key. “We couldn’t have gotten away with calling it a narrative game without voicing it,” she says.

Studio Drydock — and its gifted voice director, Krizia Bajos — took immense care in casting its voice actors; Kershaw laughs at how the the team auditioned “so many Taras” in pursuit of the magic combination of humor, lightheartedness, and deep emotion. Their choice was Valerie Rose Lohman (she/they), who earned a BAFTA nomination for her work in What Remains of Edith Finch. “It’s important that the voices of the characters are portrayed by the community being represented,” says Lohman.

For the character of Kim, a non-binary (and emotionally guarded) town butcher, Drydock brought on Erika Ishii (she/they), a strong advocate for the LGBTQ+ community on social media. “The writing for Kim was so natural and the script was so rounded and fleshed-out,” Ishii says. “It was a dream.” The cast also includes BAFTA award-winning actor Cissy Jones as Hazel, Baraka May as Amira, and Michael Scott as Damon.

Story and game iteration was a running process; the team tested play and cutscenes on a shared Unity build, tweaking on the fly. Even in the recording studio, actors would sometimes improvise lines, or ask Cifre and Ballou to rewrite on the fly over Slack. The storyline’s pliable nature meant the actors would often play the same scene numerous ways. The scene in which Tara proposes, for instance, offered Lohman an especially engaging challenge since the game offers seven potential suitors. “Every time I recorded the proposal scenes, I was a giggling mess,” says Lohman. “The scope of representation was so fun, and I’d perform differently with, say, Kim than I would with Amira or Wesley. I feel like I got to help create seven lovely love stories.”

It also helped that the actors shared a near-eerie similarity with their characters. Lohman had recently gone through a rough break-up and has an honest-to-goodness Grandma Hazel; Ishii, like Kim, is a queer non-binary Japanese/Chinese/American with a side shave.

For its actors, Wylde Flowers was more than a job — it was an avenue to connect with a real-world community. “I’ve never worked on a project so thorough in its representation of diversity,” Lohman says. “I do believe that (games) have the power to change someone’s mind, because gaming makes you live in someone else’s shoes. That’s powerful.”

“This has spoiled me for life,” laughs Cifre. “This came at a perfect time, when people were looking for these kinds of experiences. This game is about community, and it’s wonderful to see it resonate.”

In other words, the experience was just a bit magic. “It was such a culture of supportiveness and kindness,” says Schofield. “It was lightning in a bottle.”

Learn more about Wylde Flowers

Download Wylde Flowers from Apple Arcade

Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

Explore more of the 2022 Behind the Design series

The App Store Connect REST API lets you customize and automate tasks across developer tools, giving you greater flexibility and efficiency in your workflows. Starting in November 2022, you’ll need to use this API instead of the XML feed to automate management of in-app purchases, subscriptions, metadata, and app pricing. The XML feed will continue to support existing Game Center management functionality.

Learn about the App Store Connect API