2017
TRACKS BATTLE SQUAD
Your fitness companion! Getting motivated to workout is hard. Tracks Battle Squad taps into alternative forms of motivation besides the pure health aspects to motivate you to want to get up and get your steps in. With your fox companion by your side you can get motivated with your friends to earn points from your workouts. Level up with your fitness companion!
If you are looking at it from a design perspective or an engineering perspective there are interesting product design and technical challenges that I briefly outline throughout this summary.
Tamagotchi for Health
During the 1990’s and early 2000’s Tamagotchi digital keychain pets were an extremely popular fad amongst people all over the world. Owners would spend hours taking care of small digital pets and felt an obligation to keep it clean, happy and alive. The core mechanic for taking care of these pets was to press small buttons on the device.
The core idea behind Tracks is to tap into that motivation that people already have towards something besides health in order to get them motivated enough to work out. Tracks replaces the mechanic of tapping buttons in order to take care of your pet with working out. When it’s healthy you’re healthy.
Talk To Your Fox!
Start your workouts with just your voice
Communication is a big part of being a companion and your fitness companion is no different. Being able to start and stop workouts by simply speaking to your fitness companion gives you the ability to free yourself up from looking at the screen for too long when you are working out.
The design challenge here was to make the experience from understanding your metrics to listening as seamless as possible. With the user’s attention elsewhere the large listen button doubles as the character frame and holder this allowed the user to be less accurate when they are working out and tap basically anywhere on screen except for the navigation bar for the fox to start listening. Visually if they are still wondering if they hit the button or not the red ring indicates to the user that the fox is listening as well as a thinking stance with twitching ears to indicate that the companion is in listening mode. To exit listening mode just tap again to return and the ring turns blue.
Choose your companion!
Tons of fun character styles to choose from
Having a companion that matches your personality will give users that extra incentive to take care of their companion. Seeing your companion as an extension of yourself is important in strengthening that emotional connection to your virtual counterpart.
The technical challenge here was that delivering individually created foxes cost a lot of time in terms of manual work that needed to be performed by the artists I worked with. This meant that creating a strategy for this work was important. It had to be easy enough to do as a finite set in the beginning but flexible enough that creating new characters in the future would also not become an additional challenge.
Using the same base mesh for all the foxes meant that animation time, rigging, and UV mapping could all be done once. Then every time a new character needed to be added the only thing that needed to change was the texture. This brought the activities it took to create a new character down from being a handful of separate skills to only texture painting which could be done by a single person and downloaded as an image for future iterations.
Keep Up This Time!
On the Apple Watch app your character walks with you. Even on such a small screen being able to deliver this character with all your character selections means a consistent experience across devices. This was a first for me during development working on such a tiny screen while also trying to deliver this much detail. Definitely a fun challenge.
Battle it out!
Battle to find out who’s been keeping up with their workouts
Instead of comparing calorie or step counts lets go out onto the main stage and battle it out. Use the badges, armor and characters you have collected in order to deliver a dynamic display of your power! Your strength will help you end up on top in the end.
The technical and design challenge of the battle arena in Tracks is creating a fun and dynamic experience. None of the menus and social features matter unless the game it self is fun to play. Setting the stage for some high impact sequences was critical to the success of such a gaming experience from the get go.
High impact visuals starts with the camera. Creating a dynamic camera requires an understanding of how to use 3D transforms and empty nodes in scene graph to your advantage. Thinking about the camera as a two separate pieces where one is moving back and forth between two players on a center track and the other is on a long rod that is rotating around that point would be a framework for understanding a dynamic camera. It just becomes a matter of better understanding the feeling that is generated by movement along that track and what role rotation plays in that equation as well.
Attacks should feel like attacks and making that apparent in video games is also a matter of perspective. Using a shaking transform animation on an empty node that is actually holding the camera is a quick trick. Timing this quick shake to happen as the fox exhibits the motions of being struck by an attack move gives moves more weight and power. Without these subtle additions the attacks could end up feeling like a light poke rather than a fierce attack from an opponent. This is both a design and technical problem as understanding how that weight and force is represented on screen is more of an art and understanding how that translates to a sequence triggered set of transforms is all code.
Speed it up with motion blur. Even the camera movements themselves can be thought of as feeling faster or more realistic if we add a bit of motion blur at the correct moment then camera movements can feel more realistic as well as more impactful. A slide along the invisible transform rail that defines how the camera moves can feel robotic without the proper easing function between points and blur during movement.
Collect Badges!
Collect badges and upgrade your fox for battle
Tracks puts meaning behind your workouts. Battling your friends is fun but it’s usually more fun when you also win. Leveling up your companion with better moves can help you plan out your strategy to grab the win every time. In Tracks you can unlock badges the more points you earn from working out, bring you and your game to the next level.
The design challenge here was to make badges that were distinct enough to separate them from each other but homogenous enough that they look like they are all from the same game as well as all from similar subsets within the game. Using color and symbols allowed for sub genres like earth, fire, electric and ice moves. Similar symbology allowed for easy to understand badges. Gloves, shoes, and tails were used in order to indicate punches, kicks, and strikes. By using these elements in combination I was able to lessen the number of new badge symbols that needed to be created while also creating enough new badges to cover the various types of attacks and giving them a consistent look and feel.
All the badges were first designed by hand in a digital drawing medium and then translated to models in a 3D model authoring program. Using lighting and materials to deliver the feeling of metal or ice was a matter of adjust a few lights and colors. This sped up the process of creating the badges while also giving them a clean and consistent aesthetic.
Form your squad!
Join a squad to complete challenges and earn points faster
Having a friend with you can make the journey better. Building a squad in Tracks is a great way to get motivated and stay motivated. Being able to battle and grow you squad is a great way for people in Tracks to stay connect and stay healthy.
The product challenge here is to build the network effect into the app. In order to have a way to organically drive traffic to the app means people need a reason to show their friends the app and get them onboard too.
‘Squad Goals’ help you earn points fast. In order to complete these challenges being part of a squad is a requirement. This drives the desire for someone in the app to want to bring others they know into the app together. Being part of a squad gives you the advantage which is why squads are such a critical piece of Tracks Battle Squad.
Apple featured Tracks Battle Squad in 2017 on the App Store.
2016
TRACKS: ORIGINAL
The original version of Tracks was simple and to the point. Before all of the extra features were added to Tracks the original version was much more stripped down. It focused mostly on taking care of your virtual pet. Without the external forces coming into play and changing the direction for tracks the original version was focused and mostly just an exploration of what something that had this philosophy of alternative motivations similar to tamagotchi looked like.
Your Pet in Miniature
The first version can be seen as a draft freeform exploration of this kind of project. The miniature pet on the lone island was a way to reflect that this was a pet that you took with you in your pocket.
On Your Watch
The Apple watch component to the original Tracks showed a dynamic fox who ran with you as you worked out. Your power is translated to pet health and this is a core feature that has persisted through the variations of this app.