In April 2022, Oscar de la Hera Gomez and I set out to create a mixed reality game together. Our objectives was for it to be something that we would be proud of as well as making an experience which was fun, delightful and worth sharing. We gave ourselves a time limit of 1 month to complete the game
I worked on the design and visuals of the game whilst Oscar was the developer. The first version of the game was released to the general public on June 1st 2022 for iPad and MacOS ahead of Oscar's first visit to Apple Park, as part of a special invitation by Apple to attend their World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). Since the first release, we have also released the version on iPhone.
We set up catch-ups during our free time outside of our jobs and brainstormed over 50 different potential solutions before landing on a mixed reality game of Whack-A-Mole. To save time on visual design, I decided to use Emojis as our character bases. We re-used one of Oscar's hand recognition frameworks he developed as the user input mechanism when trying to save chickens. We decided the game would display distressed chickens, which the user had to save by capturing them with a hand gesture and foxes, which the user had to try and avoid.
Handover of the design and user experience was paramount. I mapped out the different screens and states we needed and documented this in our Figma project. Oscar then helped to create application and game states which allowed him to develop the experience.
We both worked toward the goal of having this App released on the App Store. The App was rejected the first time, so we made corrections based on Apples user guidelines feedback and had it successfully approved in our second attempt. We ended up releasing 3 different versions; mobile, tablet and for Mac.
