{"id":134555,"date":"2023-06-06T01:00:18","date_gmt":"2023-06-06T01:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/news\/?id=mc4d1ufa"},"modified":"2023-06-06T01:00:18","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T01:00:18","slug":"behind-the-design-stitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2023\/06\/06\/behind-the-design-stitch\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Design: stitch."},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

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.<\/em>, a charming cross between casual puzzler, meditative exercise, and afternoon craft project \u2014 and as cross-generational a game as you\u2019re likely to find.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe pride ourselves on making games that anyone can play,\u201d says Jakob Lykkegaard, founder of Lykke Studios, the team behind stitch.<\/em> \u201cIt\u2019s important to spend the time to make them available for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"In<\/div>\n

stitch.<\/em> 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\u2019s just beneath the display. There\u2019s no linear progression in stitch.<\/em>; challenges are presented in the form of \u201choops\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s precedent for those choices. Lykke Studios\u2019 painting puzzler tint.<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

\"Jakob<\/div>\n

With stitch.<\/em>, which was built with Unity, the studio explored accessibility features even further. \u201cNumber Outlines\u201d creates sharper and more contrasting outlines on the puzzles\u2019 numbers. \u201cBig Numbers\u201d makes them larger and easier to read. \u201cReduce Motion\u201d limits sudden movements and animations. And the left-handed mode shifts problematic UI out of the way for left-handed players. Lykkegaard says, \u201cOriginally, the icon indicator was actually under the hand for left-handed people. We thought, \u2018That\u2019s an issue we hadn\u2019t considered. How can we fix it?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

\n

We pride ourselves on making games that anyone can play.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jakob Lykkegaard, founder of Lykke Studios<\/p>\n

<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lykkegaard says the team took an unusual approach to sewing up the idea for stitch.<\/em> \u201cWe build games a little bit upside down,\u201d he says. \u201cIt usually starts with us falling in love with some material and building a game mechanic around it later. We\u2019ll see how it feels on device and, if it\u2019s not working, we\u2019ll kill the project and move on to another material.\u201d For stitch.<\/em>, that material came from a serendipitous day on social media. \u201cWe honestly just saw a post about embroidery and thought, \u2018Wow, that looks really nice.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/div>\n

For that mechanic, the team found inspiration in an unlikely analog source: a geometric grid-based puzzle game called Shikaku found in Japanese newspapers. \u201cWe took the grid and skewed it into something that looks nice but isn\u2019t uniform,\u201d he says. \u201cFrom there, we had a lot of options for how players could fill it out.\u201d<\/p>\n

As with tint., the team looked to strike a balance that would challenge players without making them feel lost or intimidated. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to make a game like sudoku where people thought, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s too difficult for me.\u2019 But we also didn\u2019t want something that was just an endless series of careless clicks. stitch.<\/em> couldn\u2019t be too hard for kids, but it couldn\u2019t be too childish either.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s working. Lykkegaard has heard from 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds who\u2019ve been drawn to the game\u2019s approachable, accessible style. \u201cThe question is: How can we get a player to enjoy it, feel smart, and want to relax with the game? Once you\u2019ve generated that feeling, players will come back. And we want to make everyone feel like this is a game for them.\u201d <\/p>\n

Learn more about stitch.<\/a><\/p>\n

Download stitch. from Apple Arcade<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Explore more of the 2023 Behind the Design series<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2014 and as cross-generational a game as you\u2019re likely to find. \u201cWe pride ourselves on making games […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134556,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apple-developer-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}