iPhone, Apple Watch
Front-end Programmer
Game Designer
AUG – DEC, 2024
About this project
Beyond Beyond Touch (the second semester of Beyond Touch) is a student-pitched academic project developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) that reimagines the capabilities and constraints of the Apple Watch to support social gaming experiences. Believing that portable gaming can go beyond the touch screen, our goal is to enhance social interaction between players by leveraging Apple Watch’s functionalities and integrating physical data as part of the gameplay.
Supported by Apple AIML Engineering Manager Gierad Laput, we explore the wearable IoT(Apple Watch) potential for creating engaging social gaming experiences.
The social game we developed in the first semester and published in the second, Otter Agent: Truth or Lie, is now available for download on the App Store. You can learn more about it on the page of Beyond Touch project.
In the second half of the second semester, we designed and developed a social game called Otter Agent: ConquerFit, an asynchronous social experience app that maps real-world calorie burns, tracked by a fitness watch, to in-game actions. The game motivates daily exercise by turning fitness into a fun, territory-conquering competition between friends.
My Roles
Since my main responsibility in the second half of the semester was maintaining, updating, and optimizing Otter Agent: Truth or Lie, including fixing bugs, updating UI elements, and enhancing the user experience, I was less involved in the front-end programming side of Otter Agent: ConquerFit compared to my contributions during Beyond Touch.
However, I did contribute to Otter Agent: ConquerFit by creating the gadget cards and implementing the gadget card selection feature, allowing players to choose which card in their hand to use and trigger the effects during gameplay.
On the game design side, I initially proposed a fitness-Go competition prototype to the team, where players from two teams would play a game of Go, earning a limited number of stones each day based on the calories they burned. However, the paper prototype proved to be slow-paced (which we already accelerated a lot) and didn’t effectively motivate players to exercise more in order to gain additional stones.
In light of this, Shihhung suggested incorporating mechanics inspired by Splatoon, and we explored the idea of creating a territory-conquering game where calories burned would translate into in-game steps. This concept ultimately evolved into Otter Agent: ConquerFit, which includes additional gamified features such as gadget cards to enhance strategy and engagement.