Alien Watch  was my first attempt as a game designer on Apple Watch.

Inspired by LCD games of the 90s I decided to replicate the experience on the Apple Watch.

The medium vs the nature of the app presented many different and interesting  user experience challenges

Inspired by a watch owned by my childhood friend in which we used to shoot planes, I decided to replicate this design idea in the age of apple watch.

It started as a personal project, but later it ended on the App Store, selling multiple copies in various stores around the world.

At that time Apple Watch was running Watch OS 2, meaning that Spritekit was not available, neither animations, and buttons placeholders were fixed into place, being extreme difficult if not impossible to change them at run time.

Besides the responsiveness of the watch was extremely laggy, Apple Watch Series 0 is low on processing power and the battery is not string enough. These are concepts that a designer should take in mind when designing for wearables even today!

In terms of user experience, the screen is very small, the finger covers most of the screen when interacting (at that time the developers had no access to the crown, so interactions had to be made on screen.

Those were the reasons for delivering this UI design, so as to give as more space as possible for the “action”.

The reception was very positive, covered in press releases. Got a lot of positive feedback and had some strong sale numbers (for a watch game 😋)