Category: Apple Developer News

What makes Duolingo such an engaging way to learn a language? The answer is hiding in plain sight. “The secret to Duolingo is that we’re not an education company. We’re a fun and motivation company,” says Ryan Sims, VP of design. “Fun is the most important part of the work we do.”

More than a decade since its launch, Duolingo continues to boast best-in-class design, great interactions, and an easy-to-follow UI. It’s filled with fun touches, like gamified lessons, hilarious characters, and a learning path that leans on actual conversations. And then there’s Duo, the famously tenacious owl mascot who achieved viral notoriety for his skill at encouraging people to extend their learning streaks. The app has figured out how to make a daily language lesson feel not like classwork but a joy.

This past year, Duolingo launched a major learning path redesign. In previous versions, it focused on a main screen — known as “the tree” — that let people explore numerous routes. “Two people could spend the same number of hours doing the same number of lessons, but end up in different places,” says Sims. Today, all Duolingo users follow a single route. “We call it ‘the path,’” says Sims. “It was a complete reboot of our product strategy.”

The path redesign coincided with another important update: animations for Duolingo’s wonderful cast of characters. There’s Lily, a perpetually unimpressed teen with a dismissive slow-clap; Oscar, a dramatic teacher who takes his job very seriously; and Eddy, a fitness buff with an enthusiasm for just about everything. Their subtle animations when people get something right are a reward in themselves. “A lot of that character interaction was informed by seeing how people connected with Duo,” says Sims.

The secret to Duolingo is that we’re not an education company. We’re a fun and motivation company.

Ryan Sims, Duolingo VP of design

Filling the app with memorable personalities required world-building — a process not often found in language apps. “It’s such a gigantic task,” says Sims, “and it really just started with our head of art, Greg Hartman, who began drawing characters and saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you encountered the same people through the entire experience?’” And of course, there’s a team of experts on hand to make sure every character’s story is consistent. “There are quite a few people whose job is to help write these stories and make sure they don’t contradict each other,” says Sims, with a laugh.

Duolingo’s approach under the hood may have changed, but the sense of fun is still front and center.

The lessons are brisk and breezy, emphasizing the building blocks of language through repeated phrases and sentences. And it’s all designed not just to attract learners, but to get them to stick around through quick lessons, compelling rewards, and unapologetic encouragement to keep their streaks alive. “You learn a language to connect to another human. That’s all it comes down to,” says Sims. “That’s why we’re passionate about teaching folks to speak new languages — because it brings everyone together.”

Learn more about Duolingo

Download Duolingo from the App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

At first glance, Evan Kice’s Afterplace appears to have time-traveled from the late 1980s. It’s a 2D top-down pixelated adventure game full of blocky characters, blippy music, and retro typefaces. If you were ever into the games of the era — and Kice very much was — it feels like a delightful visit from an old friend.

“I grew up on those games,” says Kice. “I was always carrying them around. And I was also the kind of kid who’d look at a manhole cover and think, ‘That is definitely the entrance to a dungeon.’”

Yet for all its nostalgia, Afterplace is a decidedly modern game too. It’s fast, fluid, incredibly easy to pick up, and features a surprisingly huge map. Its characters look like 1989 but talk like 2023, especially the sarcastic vending machine that dispenses random jokes and the friendly rabbit that provides advice. (For instance: “If you think something’s going to attack you, don’t be there anymore. Like, move away.”)

It’s especially impressive when you realize that Kice is the game’s sole designer, developer, and artist. He began making video games at age 11, studied software engineering in college, and took a few game design courses. But mostly, he taught himself along the way. “Honestly, I just watched a lot of tutorials,” he says. “YouTube is how I learned art, sound, music, and basically everything that wasn’t programming or game design.”

The game is also brilliantly designed for mobile, with one-finger controls that make it easy to explore. Tap to interact with an object or slash your way out of trouble. Or tap and drag anywhere on the screen to move around. In fact, one of Kice’s earliest design decisions was to lean on touch screen interaction paradigms instead of drawing controls on screen. “I was never a fan of virtual buttons or d-pads,” says Kice. “I’ve played a lot of those kinds of games, and often ended up going a direction I didn’t want to go. And I personally enjoyed being able to play with one thumb while standing in line somewhere.”

That drive for simplicity also informed the interactions between hero and enemy. “Some games have simple enemies but a complex you,” he says. “Afterplace has a simple you but complex enemies. Whenever you walk up to something, you have to say, ‘What is this guy gonna do? I gotta figure this out.’ That’s your whole job. You’re not worried about doing double backflips because you’re too busy trying not to get smashed in the face.”

Enemies lurk everywhere in Afterplace’s massive worlds. Levels stretch out in all directions; what looks like a humble library is secretly a multilevel maze. “I always loved it when a game just kept going,” says Kice. “I was fascinated by the idea that a game could hold an entire country.”

I was never a fan of virtual buttons or d-pads. And I personally enjoyed being able to play with one thumb while standing in line somewhere.

Evan Kice, Afterplace creator

He was also fascinated by vintage heroes and villains. “All the characters in Afterplace are the same resolution as the characters in my favorite childhood games,” he says. “I really, really loved those characters. But they were just static images; they faced four directions and had a blank stare on them. As a kid, I would think, ‘I would love it if they did anything more than stand in place and say one line of dialogue.” Inspired, he challenged himself on Afterplace to see how expressive that vintage resolution could be. “Turns out they’re pretty expressive!” he laughs.

Afterplace’s expressiveness comes through in its clever dialogue, like the character who encourages players to be more strategic in their attacks by saying, “You wouldn’t imagine how many dunderheads just keep swingin’ away at a monster.” The game’s music — which Kice wrote and performed — starts in an 8-bit style but expands to become more orchestral later on, a trick he picked up from the game Undertale. “If you start out the game with a retro sound, then later break out the string quartet or horror violins, it has a lot more impact,” he says. “The rest of the game has maybe three melodies in it. I’ll pretend that’s because I’m a cool designer using leitmotifs, but it’s actually the maximum number of melodies I could think of.”

Never a fan of intro cutscenes, Kice designed Afterplace’s onboarding to get players right into the action. “I love story in games, but I almost always skip those introductions. I’m just not invested yet,” he says.

Afterplace also features a bevy of accessibility options that let players adjust text scaling, camera shake amount, contrast, and more. There’s even an invincibility mode, if players are really having trouble with those monsters. It’s all part of a strategy to appeal to anyone, regardless of their video game history — if they have one at all.

I love story in games, but I almost always skip those introductions.

Evan Kice, Afterplace creator

“Afterplace is very niche,” he says. It’s for people who maybe don’t play games on mobile. But if it helps bring more people into gaming, I think that’s great.”

Learn more about Afterplace

Download Afterplace from the App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

When Swupnil Sahai started creating SwingVision, he had no app-building experience — but he’d played a lot of tennis.

“The initial idea was, ‘Maybe we can use the accelerometer and gyroscope on Apple Watch to figure out how fast I’m swinging, and maybe we can use the [Apple Watch] screen to keep score,’” says Sahai from his workspace in the Bay Area. “That was really it.”

The app was a true passion project for Sahai, who jumped into SwingVision pretty much cold. “Although I’d programmed in other languages, Swift seemed much more approachable, so I thought ‘Maybe I can pick this up on my own.’” He not only picked it up, he found the learning curve so speedy and enjoyable that he was staying up later and later to plunge into SwingVision and Swift. “I was building in Xcode on day one,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun working.”

Today, SwingVision has become the definitive tennis app, and an incredible example of the combined power of cameras, machine learning, and the concept of filling a need. It’s beautifully and exclusively designed for iOS, with an easy-to-navigate UI that makes it accessible to both officially sanctioned matches and people practicing on the weekends.

It’s also become an integral part of the tennis community. SwingVision is now used for line calling, the definitive say on whether a ball is in or out — a call that’s still left to players themselves. “It’s rare to have judges on the court in tennis,” says Sahai. “In baseball, you have umpires. Even middle-school basketball has referees. Somehow in tennis you have to do everything yourself.”

I was building in Xcode on day one. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun working.

Swupnil Sahai, SwingVision founder

Founded in 2015 by Sahai, along with close friend and current CTO Richard Hsu, the app couldn’t be simpler. Point your iPhone or iPad camera at the court and SwingVision tells you how fast you’re serving, the consistency of your shots, and how to shape up your posture and footwork. It does so by using advanced machine learning to track shots (a pretty intensive process). “It allows you to call lines more accurately than you could with your own eyes. But if you don’t record at 60 fps, you won’t even see the ball bounce — it just moves too fast,” he says. “Of course, 1080p video is very, very high resolution. It’s something like 2 million pixels that all have to be processed 60 times a second. We had to innovate a lot to make these models as lean as possible. This app is basically not possible without Neural Engine.”

SwingVision, now powered by a team of 23, has evolved quite a bit. Players can now stream matches live — both the video and the on-screen data — and afterward, the app creates an easily shareable highlight reel. One of its latest features sets up “target zones” on the court to help players practice their serves — a great example of how the video-centric app integrates tightly with Apple Watch. “Serving is traditionally the most boring thing to practice,” laughs Sahai. “So we gamified it with different sound effects and a progress monitor on Apple Watch. Even with all our video, Apple Watch is still critical because it elevates the experience.”

In addition to driving the success of his app, Sahai shares his development expertise by continuing to teach a UC Berkeley course called Data 8: Foundations of Data Science — currently the largest class on campus. He’s known as “the SwingVision guy.” “Sometimes I’ll see a post from a student that says, ‘Wait, you made that?’” he laughs. “The community there is very supportive.”

Learn more about SwingVision

Download SwingVision from the App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

Few apps have made mindfulness as accessible as Headspace.

More than a decade since its launch, the app continues to set the standard for mental health apps — an especially notable accomplishment, as it can be difficult to communicate challenging topics like mindfulness and mental health through an app. “Demystification is a word we use a lot,” says Jeff Birkeland, Headspace senior vice president and general manager for member products. “Mindfulness and mental health can seem complex, perhaps mystical, maybe even inaccessible. So how do we make it approachable and friendly? And how do we get people to the right content faster?”

The answer is an intentional mix of design, organization, and style. “I think the root of our success from the very beginning was creating a warm feel and brand,” he says.

It’s hardly an overstatement to say that Headspace has been part of a tremendous social change regarding mental health. Birkeland says the app has been used by more than 100 million people in nearly 200 countries and regions, and it’s easy to see why. Headspace is an incredibly versatile tool for anyone looking for a quick clarity break, longer guided sessions, or help with sleep or exercise. And its huge library of resources is there whenever people need it.

Headspace smartly organizes its library of resources through language. Collections and exercises are labeled with understandable purposes, like Unlocking Creativity, Mindful Eating, and The Shine Collection, a set of activities drawn from Headspace’s recent merger with Shine, a mindfulness app dedicated to providing inclusive and accessible mental health resources that support marginalized communities. “It’s still a simple app,” Birkeland says, “but it’s not a very long trip into an extensive archive.”

How do we make [mindfulness and mental health] approachable and friendly? And how do we get people to the right content faster?

Jeff Birkeland, Headspace senior vice president for member products

In previous versions of Headspace, the core navigation included tabs for meditation, focus, movement, and sleep. But Birkeland says user research convinced the team to strip away that complexity and focus instead on the app’s Today tab, which facilitates one-tap access to activities of varying lengths for morning, afternoon, and night. Importantly, it does so without bringing up specific categories.

The Explore tab, meanwhile, is the gateway to that vast bank of content — including those former category-based parts of the core navigation. “There’s still simplicity at the surface,” says Birkeland. “But there’s an incredible depth of content underneath.” This tab is also where people find collections and activities of all kinds, including those with titles like Cultivating Black Joy and Navigating Injustice that illustrate Headspace’s commitment to representation.

“Mindfulness, meditation, mental health — none of these are easy to navigate,” Birkeland says. “An app that feels warm, friendly, and easy to use can provide approachable support for tough issues.”

Learn more about Headspace

Download Headspace from the App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

Workout tracking has never looked — or felt — like it does in Any Distance.

“We’re building something for everyone, not just athletes,” says Luke Beard, the Atlanta-based designer who created this Swift app with engineer Daniel Kuntz. “We’re not athletically inclined people. We’re kind of dorks! I want to retire and take photos in Iceland one day. Dan wants to retire and play music in the desert. We’re not looking to go to the Olympics, but we do want to live long, healthy lives.”

Their app is a design-forward fitness tracker and social network that delivers workout stats in beautiful and shareable formats — dynamic charts and graphs, animated 3D maps, AR experiences, and gorgeous cards — that can integrate photos. It draws heavily on SF Symbols — as Beard cheekily puts it, “SF Symbols is the single greatest contribution to design Apple has ever made.” It offers elegant in-app collectibles and an in-house social network aimed at connecting people with a small circle of friends. And its name is also its philosophy: Any Distance counts, not just a swim or bike ride, but a walking meeting, stroller run, or its most popular option, a dog walk.

Any Distance is heavily powered by Apple tools and technologies. It uses ARKit for rendering routes, HealthKit for workout data, Metal rendering for what Kuntz calls the “gradient background swirly thing,” SceneKit for rendering, MapKit, Apple Watch integration, and more. It also demonstrates Any Distance’s commitment to privacy. “Your data is all in HealthKit; we don’t store it unless you post it to your friends,” Beard says. “We don’t let you share a map. Route clipping (in which the beginning and end of your routes are trimmed from public view) is on by default.” And people can choose exactly what data they want to share with friends by simply tapping the eye icon under each metric.

SF Symbols is the single greatest contribution to design Apple has ever made.

Luke Beard, Any Distance founder

Beard conceived of the idea for Any Distance during the pandemic, when his lifestyle wasn’t quite as healthy as he would have liked. To shake himself out of his funk, he began going on long walks, posting photos of his journeys along the way. “I’m a chronic oversharer,” laughs Beard, “and a photographer at heart. And I was getting good feedback.” Eventually, he started designing templates for his social media posts. “Honestly, it was just a photo in a mask — the oval that’s now one of our main brand characteristics — with the route and stats in a fun font. But people would ask, ‘What app is making those?’”

By this point, he’d already connected with Daniel Kuntz, a programmer and musician who already had a few titles on the App Store. “As a developer, I’m often asked, ‘Hey, can you make this app?’ And I’m always like, ‘Nah,’” says Kuntz. “In this case, Luke had it all fleshed out. He had iOS components and a Sketch file. It was simple and clear and really cool.”

This year, the team also plans to add more unorthodox activity options like trick-or-treating. “Eventually we want to organize group bike rides or group dog walks,” says Beard. “The last few years have accelerated the loneliness epidemic so much, and we think working out or being active together is the new hanging out. It doesn’t matter if you’re walking half a mile, taking a stroller walk with your kid, or walking with a cane — there should be a space for you.”

Download Any Distance from the App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

For all its many genres and styles, the gaming world has been awfully threadbare when it comes to experiences about embroidery. That all changes with stitch., a charming cross between casual puzzler, meditative exercise, and afternoon craft project — and as cross-generational a game as you’re likely to find.

“We pride ourselves on making games that anyone can play,” says Jakob Lykkegaard, founder of Lykke Studios, the team behind stitch. “It’s important to spend the time to make them available for everyone.”

stitch. sets up embroidery-based puzzles that players complete to finish a pattern, like an adorable penguin or a love note to bacon. Players swipe over an incredibly lifelike and beautifully textured surface that feels like it’s just beneath the display. There’s no linear progression in stitch.; challenges are presented in the form of “hoops” that players can explore at their own pace. And the game supports multiple languages and custom accessibility tools for people with color blindness, low vision, and motion sensitivities.

There’s precedent for those choices. Lykke Studios’ painting puzzler tint. was nominated for a 2022 Apple Design Award in the Inclusivity category, thanks in part to a colorblind mode that lets players solve each watercolor-based puzzle by using patterns and texture instead of color.

With stitch., which was built with Unity, the studio explored accessibility features even further. “Number Outlines” creates sharper and more contrasting outlines on the puzzles’ numbers. “Big Numbers” makes them larger and easier to read. “Reduce Motion” limits sudden movements and animations. And the left-handed mode shifts problematic UI out of the way for left-handed players. Lykkegaard says, “Originally, the icon indicator was actually under the hand for left-handed people. We thought, ‘That’s an issue we hadn’t considered. How can we fix it?’”

We pride ourselves on making games that anyone can play.

Jakob Lykkegaard, founder of Lykke Studios

Lykkegaard says the team took an unusual approach to sewing up the idea for stitch. “We build games a little bit upside down,” he says. “It usually starts with us falling in love with some material and building a game mechanic around it later. We’ll see how it feels on device and, if it’s not working, we’ll kill the project and move on to another material.” For stitch., that material came from a serendipitous day on social media. “We honestly just saw a post about embroidery and thought, ‘Wow, that looks really nice.’”

For that mechanic, the team found inspiration in an unlikely analog source: a geometric grid-based puzzle game called Shikaku found in Japanese newspapers. “We took the grid and skewed it into something that looks nice but isn’t uniform,” he says. “From there, we had a lot of options for how players could fill it out.”

As with tint., the team looked to strike a balance that would challenge players without making them feel lost or intimidated. “We didn’t want to make a game like sudoku where people thought, ‘Oh, that’s too difficult for me.’ But we also didn’t want something that was just an endless series of careless clicks. stitch. couldn’t be too hard for kids, but it couldn’t be too childish either.”

It’s working. Lykkegaard has heard from 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds who’ve been drawn to the game’s approachable, accessible style. “The question is: How can we get a player to enjoy it, feel smart, and want to relax with the game? Once you’ve generated that feeling, players will come back. And we want to make everyone feel like this is a game for them.”

Learn more about stitch.

Download stitch. from Apple Arcade

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

Flighty might be the easiest thing travelers navigate on their entire trip. “Travel can be a high-stress situation,” says Ryan Jones, the Austin-based developer who founded the app in 2019. “We want Flighty to work so well that it feels almost boringly obvious.”

Conceived during — when else? — a long flight delay, Flighty puts key information front and center with an immediately understandable interface, live maps, and a look that mirrors time-honored airport design conventions. The best-in-class travel app is a flight tracker, airport navigator, and concierge — and with incredible implementations of Live Activities and the Dynamic Island, a companion that makes key information available at all times.

“There’s something comforting about information always being there,” Jones says. “You don’t have to check your phone and think, ‘OK, I have to be at the gate in 32 minutes,’ and then, ‘Now I have to be there in 29 minutes.’ And I don’t know about you, but every time I walk on a plane, I look at my seat number, put it down, and immediately say, ‘Wait, what was my seat number?’”

Since its 2019 launch, Flighty has been an incredible example of the carefully crafted use of Apple technologies. “We’re really doing this out of a passion and love for the product,” says Jones, “We all had our lives changed by iOS and mobile, so we get really excited about adopting new technologies.”

They’ve added a lot. Flighty supports widgets on the Home Screen and Lock Screen, highlighting content using Shared with You, and more. With a few taps, travelers can even live-share their flight path and arrival time with loved ones who may not even have the app installed — a wonderfully convenient feature for coordinating airport pickups.

We want Flighty to work so well that it feels almost boringly obvious.

Ryan Jones, Flighty founder

Flighty is consistently impressive in adjusting to the unpredictable nature of travel. “We really have to shine when things go awry,” says Jones. For instance, the app must account for how every single person will, at some point, lose their internet connection. “Whenever [someone] takes off, we have to assume that we won’t see them again until they land,” says Jones. The solve? At a certain point before a flight takes off, the Dynamic Island switches over to flight progress bars and counters, displaying minimal presentation in a simple circular chart that tracks a flight’s duration.

Visually, both Live Activities and the Dynamic Island are designed to recall airport signage conventions that have been in place for decades. “That’s our real-world analogy,” Jones says. “Those airport boards have one line per flight, and that’s a good guiding light — they’ve had 50 years of figuring out what’s important.”

While the design process is comprehensive, it’s not always fast. “It’s so tempting to start pulling from your existing asset library to see if you can quickly put something together,” he says. To avoid falling back on old ideas, the Flighty team creates 20 design ideas during the concept phase. “It’s what fits on a sheet of paper,” he says with a smile. “You get to six or seven ideas and think, ‘OK, that’s it, there’s none left.’ But then you think, ‘Well, I have an idea that will probably look bad,’ and then you try it and it’s not bad at all.”

Flighty is even fun at home. The Flighty Passport feature shows flights, miles, and travel stats through gorgeous, shareable custom artwork. It’s just more proof that Flighty really is for every step of the journey — even being back home.

Learn more about Flighty

Download Flighty from the App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

Evil has never looked better than it does in Resident Evil Village.

The AAA horror adventure is a masterpiece of visual detail on Mac, a feast of creepy castles, decrepit factories, and majestically gothic villains. The game’s bleak village is thick with details and dread; characters like Lady Dimitrescu and the game’s army of mutant lycans nearly pop out of the screen. Simply put, Resident Evil Village contains some of the most realistic graphics ever seen on Apple hardware. And the lavish visuals don’t just look amazing; they drag players into the game’s horrifying landscape and through dark mysteries, vicious confrontations, and mind-blowing plot twists.

It’s all powered by a remarkable assembly of cutting-edge Apple technologies. Resident Evil Village takes full advantage of Apple silicon, ProMotion, Metal 3, and extended dynamic range to serve up its breathtaking visual achievements. “The game is very pretty, but it has this incredible sense of fear,” says Tsuyoshi Kanda, one of the game’s producers. “In some of the first scenes, you end up battling this horde of lycans. The sheer amount of them is impressive. But each has its own intention and personality. We’re happy with how it turned out.”

Those achievements are especially clear in the game’s village, which feels like a character in itself. The village shines in its decay; it’s a showcase of textures, geometry, and complex shaders. And players can enable MetalFX Upscaling to make it look especially breathtaking. Kazuki Kawato from the game’s engine team says the game benefits from both spatial and temporal upscaling. “Both were easy to use and gave us the results we wanted,” he says.

Masaru Ijuin, senior manager in the engine development team, says he always knew the game was beautiful. “Our main focus was taking the base game and making it run as fast and as stable as possible on Mac,” he says, “and I think we did that.”

Kanda calls out the Castle Dimitrescu, home of the game’s breakout villain, the 9-foot-tall vampire giantess Lady Dimitrescu. “The castle looks incredible no matter where you are,” he says. “There’s an entrance hall with a chandelier inside that we’re all really proud of. The team worked hard to create the best graphics possible on the hardware.”

The game’s visuals are deserving of acclaim, but Resident Evil Village also boasts an incredible story and character design. It’s a masterclass in horror pacing that skillfully mixes bursts of frantic action with long stretches of good old dread-building. Kanda says the team paid special attention to creating what he proudly calls a “variety of horrific entertainment.”

“The concept is a horror theme park with characters that stand out against this beautifully rendered environment,” he says. “The stages cycle between horror and action to help players stay balanced. That’s something we learned from other Resident Evil games.”

Balance was also key in creating the game’s story, which had to fit into the Resident Evil universe (Village is the eighth major game in the series) while taking the storyline in wild new directions. “One of the base concepts was Ethan Winters at home with his wife and baby daughter, Rose,” says Kanda. “You see Ethan’s fatherly love all throughout the game.”

The concept is a horror theme park, with characters that stand out against this beautifully rendered environment.

Tsuyoshi Kanda, Resident Evil Village producer

But in the game’s intro, Rose is kidnapped from the family home in a shocking confrontation with Chris Redfield, a character who’s been around since the first Resident Evil. “Chris was such a big part of world-building this; the way he enters the game was so important,” says Kanda. “We didn’t want you to know his intentions until the ending.”

To get to that ending — which is as dramatic as Kanda promises — players must battle through a murderer’s row of memorable villains that look alive, even if they’re (probably?) not. There’s Salvatore Moreau, a hideous mutant; Karl Heisenberg, who runs a factory with some serious health-code violations; Donna Beneviento and her scary doll, which is probably all we need to say about that; and Lady Dimitrescu, the superstar with huge claws, a deathly gothic wardrobe, and a surprisingly devoted fan base.

“The idea for Lady Dimitrescu was a huge character who was too big for the castle itself,” says Kanda. “She has to duck to get through the doors. And when she comes at you, you really feel her presence.”

As an incredible example of Mac gaming, Resident Evil makes its presence felt too. But this story has a twist ending of its own: Kanda, Ijuin, and Kawato personally aren’t all that into horror. “The (Resident Evil) creative team loves horror movies,” laughs Kanda, “but I’m more into the not-too-scary stuff.”

Learn more about Resident Evil Village

Download Resident Evil Village from the Mac App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

For a creative guy, Luke Spierewka, founder of the Poland-based game studio Afterburn, is certainly a fan of limitations.

“We make comfy puzzle games that convey an idea quickly,” he says, “but they’re all about using a limited amount of something, which is where the challenge comes in.”

In Afterburn’s Railbound, players are challenged to link train cars in proper order by laying down track, manipulating switches, and navigating an increasingly convoluted series of gates, tunnels, and stations. While the puzzles may be tricky, interacting with them is sheer joy. The track-laying mechanic is as simple as finger painting, mistakes can be easily undone, and the game is full of thoughtful details, like its duo of canine conductors or the squiggly frustration cloud that appears over a misdirected train car. And it’s all presented in a bright cartoon style inspired by European comics.

Railbound’s interaction design is the product of Spierewka’s drive to make his studio’s games ever easier to play. “I pay a lot of attention to input. For Railbound, I wanted a system where you basically paint rail tiles with one finger,” he says. “I knew if we didn’t make that mechanic fun and malleable, people would be much less inclined to play. And I think we got there,” he says, before pausing and adding, “but I’m still thinking about how to make it more intuitive.”

The studio, which Spierewka runs with his wife, Kamila, also paid close attention to the size of the puzzles. “In games like Stephen’s Sausage Roll or A Monster’s Expedition, the size of the level is exactly what you need to solve it. I’m not gonna pretend we’re as elegant as those, but I try to constrain our puzzles and space as much as I can, and leave only the stuff you need.”

That strategy also applies to the game’s onboarding, a process that’s largely wordless because of the unsubtle lessons the Afterburn team learned on previous games. “The first version of [our earlier game] Golf Peaks had all this onboarding text,” he says. “The first level introduced five different concepts. The second level was like, ‘This is a new tile type, deal with it.’ The third level was like, ‘Here’s another new type, deal with that too,’” he laughs. “And nobody read them! Every single person I handed a phone to tapped right past the blocks of onboarding text. It was kind of a shock, really.”

Nobody read them! Every single person I handed a phone to tapped right past the blocks of onboarding text. It was kind of a shock, really.

Luke Spierewka, Afterburn

For Railbound, Spierewka jettisoned words entirely. “We thought, ‘What is the simplest way we can break down and teach mechanics?’” The answer was to integrate them into early gameplay. Railbound’s first level gives players just one way to place a track; it’s actually impossible not to beat. In levels 1 through 3, you learn to bend and rotate tiles. “You’re not even taught how to delete tiles until several levels in, because you don’t need to yet. It’s all a dance of introducing and reinforcing concepts at the right pace.” In other words, even the onboarding is an example of using only the stuff you need.

Learn more about Railbound

Download Railbound from the App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series

Endling is all about survival in a changed world — and it’s a powerful mix of medium and message.

The game is a gorgeous adventure in which you play as a fox navigating a land charred by environmental disaster and human impact. Endling is not subtle — particularly when the fox starts defending its tiny offspring from an ever-increasing array of man-made dangers. Still, it draws players in with beautiful visuals, lush animations, a moody soundtrack, and brilliantly intuitive gameplay.

“It’s a survival game, but a simplified one that focuses more on telling a story,” says Philipp Nägelsbach, game designer and producer at HandyGames.

When creating such a game, balance is paramount. “You need to have cute scenes with the foxes safe in their lair, learning and growing,” says Nägelsbach. “And you have to have dramatic scenes to illustrate the real dangers.”

After an onboarding process that drops players into the heat of the action, the game becomes an open-world adventure that rewards exploration. That wasn’t always the case; Nägelsbach notes that the game’s earliest versions had a more linear structure. “It didn’t suit the message as well,” he says. “It’s much easier to show the ecological impact humans have when you visit the same spot several times and see a river that’s full of trash or a forest that’s been cut down.”

To control the fox, players operate a simple one-thumb control on the lower-left corner of the screen. The game gradually introduces additional interactions, like the ability to climb or jump over an obstacle. “That’s the moment people realize this isn’t entirely a side-scroller,” says Nägelsbach.

And then there’s the fox itself. Endling casts players as the animal in distress to create an instant sense of empathy — and their choice of animal was well-considered. “Foxes are some of the most adaptable animals in the world,” says Nägelsbach. “They’re not the biggest or smallest; they’re in the middle of the food chain. But if they’re close to extinction, things are really bad.”

It’s a survival game, but a simplified one that focuses more on telling a story.

Philipp Nägelsbach, game designer and producer at HandyGames

Doing so required numerous design considerations. The fox needed to be adorable enough to engage with, realistic enough to feel authentic, and believable enough to navigate the apocalyptic landscape. The fox doesn’t realize what’s happening to the environment; only the player recognizes the meaning of factories, careening trucks, and men in hazmat suits. “And the fox can only do things real foxes can do,” says Naegelsbach. “We couldn’t have the fox pushing buttons or solving complex puzzles.”

Extra attention was paid to the fox’s kits, who grow and develop unique personalities as the game goes on. Each kit represents a player’s life and has an instrument attached to it; when players lose kits, the game feels quieter and more lonely.

Nägelsbach says the teams did make adjustments to ensure the game wasn’t too severe, including the ability to replay parts of the story after a loss instead of starting over. The kits have only one owl enemy; they can’t be directly hurt by humans or dogs. And the fox’s cute bark is a mix of several different animal sounds. “In the real world, foxes aren’t very pleasant to listen to,” says Nägelsbach, “and you shouldn’t be annoyed by your protagonist.”

Endling ultimately delivers a message that sticks around long after gameplay ends. “The message is harsh,” says QA lead and producer Jan Pytlik, “but the game didn’t need to be harsh too. We worked and fine-tuned and I think we hit the mark.”

Learn more about Endling

Download Endling from the App Store

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the winners of the 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 2023 Behind the Design series