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August 30, 2022
Xcode Cloud, the continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode, accelerates the development and delivery of high-quality apps. Get started by configuring a workflow in Xcode and receive 25 compute hours per month at no cost until the end of 2023. And now, Account Holders can subscribe for more compute hours in the Apple Developer app.
Build, test, and distribute great apps using Apple’s continuous integration and delivery service, Xcode Cloud. This toolkit provides you with all the information you need to manage and optimize your workflow. Learn how to set up your first workflow, develop a workflow strategy — Xcode Cloud supports both solo developers and large teams — and build your test suite to help you deliver great apps.
Everything you need to know to begin.
About continuous integration and delivery with Xcode Cloud
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Get to know Xcode Cloud, Apple’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for building apps and frameworks for all Apple platforms. Find out how Xcode Cloud can improve both the productivity of your team and the quality of your products. We’ll show you how to start your…
Learn how Xcode Cloud workflows can help you and your team automate building, analyzing, testing, archiving, and distributing your apps and frameworks. They are flexible, extensible, and can be configured around your team’s development and distribution process. Find out the basics of Xcode Cloud…
Configuring your first Xcode Cloud workflow
Learn the ins and outs of workflow strategy and configuration.
Learn how you can use Apple’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service with development teams of any size to help you deliver high-quality apps. We’ll show you how to integrate Xcode Cloud into your team’s existing app development process and efficiently use Xcode Cloud…
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Configuring Xcode Cloud for your team
Dive deeper into Xcode Cloud’s powers.
Discover how you can get the most out of Xcode Cloud, Apple’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service. We’ll take you through an overview of Xcode Cloud and how it connects with Xcode and App Store Connect. We’ll also explore the Xcode Cloud Usage Dashboard in App Store…
Xcode Cloud integrates with Apple Developer tools and services, all major source control management services, and even social collaboration tools like Slack. If your development process relies on additional tools and external services, however, you can fine-tune your workflows and the behavior of…
Discover how you can create effective testing plans for Xcode Cloud, Apple’s continuous integration and continuous delivery service. We’ll show you how testing can be an essential tool to consistently verify your code works correctly. Learn how you can author fast, reliable, and efficient tests…
Few things are more emotionally gratifying than checking something off a to-do list (well, for some of us, anyway).
But if that sort of thing pleases you currently, wait until you get a load of the (Not Boring) Habits approach. The app’s checkbox is no mere tappable square — it’s an interactive event replete with explosive 3D animations, custom sounds, and playful haptics, all designed to make you feel less like you marked off a task and more like you landed on the moon.
“We went all out,” says Andy Allen, the app’s developer. “There was a lot of room to wrap something special around that box.”
The mighty checkbox of (Not Boring) Habits is an experience in and of itself. “We went all out,” says Andy Allen.
Magically transforming everyday events into bold, brash experiences is the driving philosophy around the (Not Boring) suite of apps from Andy Works, the studio founded by Allen and Mark Dawson. Like its siblings Weather, Calculator, and Timer, (Not Boring) Habits wildly amplifies a pretty mild-mannered category, tearing down the traditional approach in favor of eye-popping aesthetics, zingy haptics, spiffy 3D animations, and plenty of the delight and fun that nabbed the app its 2022 Apple Design Award.
“It’s about adding something extra,” says Allen. “You can write a to-do list on a piece of paper and it works just the same, right?” If strict practicality is your goal, the app ecosystem is swimming in weather apps and habit trackers, and Allen is the first to admit that (Not Boring) apps aren’t for everyone. “But,” he says with a smile, ”they’re definitely really for some people.”
In the summer of 1970, the painter John Baldessari, who’d been working for nearly two decades, decided he’d had quite enough. He collected all the paintings he’d made between May 1953 and March 1966 that were in his possession, broke them into pieces, brought them to a San Diego mortuary, and lit them all on fire. One year later, he created a lithograph called I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, consisting entirely of that single phrase, written over and over like he’d gotten in trouble with the teacher.
Allen was taken with the blaze of glory — particularly the notion of a hard break with the past. He’d studied filmmaking and worked for years as an animator, but gradually found himself drawn more to the “personal connections” possible with apps — especially in the nascent age of mobile development. One of his first apps was the hit drawing experience Paper, which won he and his FiftyThree studio an Apple Design Award in 2012.
“There was such a spirit of experimentation back then,” Allen says. “Today, and often for the right reasons, patterns and systems have been built up, and it’s certainly easier to build now. But what if we built software that embodied some of those experimental values, that tried to differentiate not purely on functionality but also design? Every day you look at the weather, or a clock, or a list of stuff to do. Why not make that a joyful — and maybe surprising — ritual?”
Andy Works co-founders Mark Dawson and Andy Allen model the company’s official logo.
This philosophy wasn’t just a design approach; it was a function of the company’s size. “There’s only two of us,” Dawson says. “Big teams will always have more features than we do — we just can’t compete there. But design is difficult to copy. You can have your own style. You can make it beautiful. And that’s something we can do while still having an opinionated feature set.”
Big teams will always have more features than we do — we just can’t compete there. But design is difficult to copy.
Mark Dawson, Andy Works co-founder
To create Habits, they started by rebranding the habit tracker. “We consider it a habit builder,” says Allen. “We try to think about it as loving the journey of creating a new habit.”
They cast that journey as an actual, well — journey — with its roots in the mythic hero quest, taking someone through dark forests and over looming mountains en route to a preordained destiny. Habits is predicated on research that indicates it takes 66 days to build a new habit; in certain ways, it’s a video game with 66 levels.
“It’s always felt a little weird that games are seen as separate in the product design world,” Allen says. “You’ll hear people referencing movies or architecture, but it’s like, ‘Well, what about this incredibly rich domain of creativity that’s super-adjacent to what we’re doing?’ Why does work have to be over here and fun over there?”
To Allen, design is a way of life. “Every day you look at the weather, or a clock, or a list of stuff to do. Why not make that a joyful and maybe surprising ritual?”
Besides, what’s a really good way to convince someone to do a job? Turn it into a game. “My daughter and I were playing Wilmot’s Warehouse, where you’re literally organizing things in a warehouse,” Allen laughs. “But it’s a game! It has a goal and challenges you! Lots of fun, basic principles can be applied to utility apps in the very same way, but for whatever reason, I just haven’t seen it. A big thing with (Not Boring) was breaking down the barrier between apps, utilities, and games.”
(Not Boring) Habits required the nifty zing of its brand, but it also needed to be a lightweight, quick-launching, scannable daily utility app. And the road to get there was about as traditional as it gets.
The app’s 3D animations are authored in the open-source modeling tool Blender, built in SceneKit — which Allen chose for its easy integration with Apple tools — and tied together with UIKit and SwiftUI views. “Most of [our] standard controls are fairly off-the-shelf, which makes things very simple and predictable,” says Allen. “We didn’t have to rethink how a button or a popover works. And SceneKit’s interfaces with UIKit and standard UI controls make it all feel more seamless, like one environment,” he says.
The levels of your habit-building journey, seen here in prototype form.
Part of Allen’s goal with building Habits was proving that such a visual experience could be built with the basics. “We chose [Blender] because we wanted to prove out a possible pipeline that didn’t require people to spend thousands of dollars on 3D software and then spend months trying to figure out how it worked,” Allen says. “We wanted to should how you could build custom, rich experiences with off-the-shelf pieces. The pipeline didn’t really exist; we had to piece it together. But once we got it working, things rolled fairly quickly.” He’s not kidding: (Not Boring) Habits was developed in all of two months.
This brings us back to the checkbox. The gonzo version of the box in the app is result of a complex, iterative design strategy that went like this: Add stuff, keep adding stuff, and follow with the inclusion of — you guessed it — yet more stuff. Here again, Allen drew from the world of gaming.
“Game designers are amazing at taking very simple inputs — like a one-button press — and turning into something much bigger,” says Allen. “The same button can feel like you’re tiptoeing around or smashing something with a sledgehammer. That was our idea: How do we take principles and techniques from games — the haptics and sounds and particle animations — and apply them to something as basic as a checkbox?”
“A big thing with (Not Boring) Habits was breaking down the barrier between apps, utilties and games,” says Allen.
In contrast with his history (“There was some real tension there with my minimalist graphic design background,” he laughs), the checkbox was an exercise in more. In fact, the more Allen added, the more he felt closer to his desired feeling. “Experiences on our phones are still trapped behind a screen,” he says, ”so you have to put in what’s taken away, and so you have to intentionally layer and layer and push and push.“
For instance, the Habits checkbox can’t merely be ticked; you have to intentionally press on the screen for longer than you might think to trigger the animation. “It’s a very big, gross interaction,” he says. “But after prototyping, we found we had to make it much more intentional; we needed feedback that told you you needed to keep holding.” Then came the iterations, sounds, and custom haptics to make it feel like more of an explosion. “There were thousands of iterations,” he laughs. “I’d do something and think, ‘OK, this is way over the top and I’m gonna do it anyway.’ And then I put it in and it’s like, ‘You know, it’s not that bad!’”
I don’t want to live in a perfectly white-walled museum all the time. I want to live where there’s richness and texture and fun.
Andy Allen, Andy Works co-founder
The language of gaming gave him much more room to play. “There’s an understanding of how much feedback you should get from a game, and honestly, the bar is pretty high. We added maybe six or seven things in the checkbox, but most games probably have two or three times that for any one interaction.” In other words, sometimes you have to get loud. “Look, minimalism is a fun place to visit for me, but it’s not somewhere I want to live,” he laughs. “I love visiting an art gallery. But I don’t want to live in a perfectly white-walled museum all the time. I want to live where there’s richness and texture and fun.”
As the saying goes, (Not Boring) is more than an app; it’s a lifestyle. “It’s tricky sometimes to communicate that you’re trying to sell someone on design,” says Dawson. “A lot of people might say, ‘Oh I don’t want to pay for that.’ But maybe it gives you new experiences — or maybe you just want to open your app and feel good.”
Win the final battle and your new habit is complete.
In the short term, Allen and Dawson are hoping for an elevated experience; in the long term, they wouldn’t mind a wholesale design revolution. “Our primary goal is to inspire other app creators to be more adventurous, to push the language of product design,” says Allen. “There’s been a coalescence over the last few years about what product should look like, and some of that is for the better, sure. But I believe we need people who want to explore new territory and find new patterns. There’s so much space with apps to connect with people in their daily lives; I’d love to see a world where we’re all immersed in amazing, interesting ideas.”
Learn more about (Not Boring) Habits
Download (Not Boring) Habits 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.
August 26, 2022
You can now watch the Keynote, Platforms State of the Union, and nearly 200 sessions from this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference with Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese subtitles. Available on the web or the Apple Developer app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV.
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.
Everything in Lego Star Wars: Castaways, from military-gray Imperial ships to fiery background planets, is what Gameloft calls ‘Lego legit.’
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.
Lego Star Wars: Castaways is set on a tropical world that isn’t as relaxing as it might look.
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.”
An early sketch of the game’s island marketplace (which includes Easter eggs like the toppled AT-AT in the lower right corner).
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.
Durand wanted the game’s character customization screens to feel like building real-life minifigs.
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.”
Stage Lego battles by land, sea, and air.
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.
Turns out the Gameloft team likes sand: Exteriors, including the sandy wastes surrounding Jabba’s palace, were rendered by software dubbed ‘the Lego-Lyzer’.
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.”
Lego Boba Fett? Where?
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.
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.’”
Curtis Herbert, taking Slopes out on the slopes.
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.
To use Slopes, just press record — the app takes care of the rest.
“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.”
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.”
Slopes shows you where you’ve been on the mountain — and how fast you got there.
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.”
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.’”
Slopes shows where your friends are on the mountain.
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.
Herbert’s app has reached both hardcore skiers and those new to the sport. “It’s fun to hear that it’s bringing families together,” he says.
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.”
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.
August 9, 2022
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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.
Captain America, Captain Marvel, and their powerful associates battle it out in Crown City, the capital of Sakaar.
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.”
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.”
Need some big green backup? As you progress through the game, you’ll join up with powerful companions. Here, Hulk pitches in on a boss fight against Loki’s blood father, Laufey.
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.”
Early sketches of Scarlet Witch’s ‘Rise of the East’ costume theme. The winner: Version B, which became the basis for the final costume.
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.”
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.
Netmarble executive producer Doohyun Cho reviews cutscene storyboards to determine the most effective ways to show Rocket Raccoon in a very short time.
“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.
Early sketches show how Netmarble defined costume components for their characters’ crafty color variants.
“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.’”
Spider-Man surveys the moonlit Hand Fortress, home to a powerful cabal of dark ninjas (and the starting region for Black Widow).
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!”
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!”
Midgardia, before and after the addition of the Bifrost Bridge.
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.
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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.”
With Odio, you can immerse yourself in an existing soundscape, or customize one to your liking by moving each element around your head.
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.
The Odio team (from left): Mees Boeijen, Roger Kemp, Max Frimout, Rutger Schimmel, and Joon Kwak.
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.”
“There’s a lot of overlap between architecture and software development,” says Volst studio founder Roger Kemp.
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 says his soundscapes have to be both interesting and “easy to ignore.”
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.
Frimout created his “Wow!” soundscape in Logic Pro — and tested the results on his AirPods Max.
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.”
The prototype for the soundscape “Atlantis” (left) and the finished version (right).
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!”
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.
