Hello everyone. I'm really excited to launch A Tiny Game of Pong with the Product Hunt community today.
A Tiny Game of Pong brings the classic ‘70s game to your Apple Watch. Compete with friends for high scores in endless arcade mode, or try to beat your opponent in a classic, first to three, match. Featuring: responsive Digital Crown controls, two unique game modes, Game Center integration, and ten custom theme colors; A Tiny Game of Pong is sure to bring back a little nostalgia to your heart.
To get hunters started the free download features our fast paced arcade mode – an endless game with an unbeatable opponent. Last as long as you humanly can and you may take the top spot on our worldwide Game Center leaderboard.
For players who wish to purchase the in-app upgrade, they’ll unlock the classic playoff mode – one versus one against a stead fast AI opponent in a first to three match. Leaderboards are available here too, tallying your total wins. The IAP also unlocks ten custom theme colors like red, green, or blue, to match the style and color of your Apple Watch band. As a bonus we’ll also present you with a Supporter Badge on our leaderboards as a thank you for supporting the games development.
Give it a try, I'll be happy to see you on there; or to answer any questions about the games development.
@jakecrump I was looking for a project to learn watchOS 2 around. So I thought pong's gameplay was straightforward enough to translate well onto the small screen. Sessions can be kept short and there's really not much to obstruct the screen. Plus when the new API opened up the Digital Crown to developers it seemed like a great fit – the original game had a dial control too.
@mattwiechec That's really interesting. I didn't realize the Digital Crown wasn't open to developers before. I can definitely see that being used for a lot more games now. Had you worked on the original watchOS? Any plans for other watch games in the future?
@jakecrump Yeah, when the watch first launched I built a watch extension for my first app Marco Polo (findmarcopolo.com). It showed a list of nearby devices using BLE. It was actually pretty handy – you could ping a misplaced iPhone or tablet, even a friend's or coworker's device, if they had Marco Polo installed. Unfortunately Apple did not approve the extension and it got scrapped.
Played with it just now... Looks cool, plays cool.
Not 100% I'll play again as it's pretty simple.
Also the watch UI'sa re lagging sometimes behind and so the gameplay isn't always smooth, I assume it's because of slow watch processing power
@altryne watchOS seems to throttle third party apps which does result in some lag at times. It's the system doing things behind the scenes. But it did take quite a bit of work to get it as responsive as it is now. Hopefully with future hardware releases it only gets better :)
@gabriel__lewis thanks. It's a careful process separating functionality between the iPhone app and the Apple Watch. In a way the requirement of having both devices is a new design consideration that maybe we haven't quite seen before. Not everything needs to be on one interface.
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