INTRO
So, there I was watching the latest community update, and the segment about widgets came on showcasing the one designed by the talented @Rahul . I do remember seeing those before when he shared them with the community but I never realised there was a Snake widget. After watching the segment and seeing his widget come to life in a future update - I was “inspired”, like a lightning bolt jumped out of the T.V. and hit me.
My mind started wondering about what games might work and the slow gears started moving thinking about what other widgets could be neat too. At the same time, I had this voice in my head of the team talking about shareable widgets in the last update and how could that be integrated somehow?
After some restless nights, I came up with something simple, a “Pong” game widget, which is the code name for the Nothing Phone 2. It did cross my mind that would all the codenames make cool widgets? Spacewar, Pong, Pac-Man? While I am no designer by any means, I Sketched out something which I wanted to share plus I came up with support widget in the process that kinda gave a different idea alltogether.
PONG WIDGET
First up the Pong widget. It’s basically the classic game of Pong, swipe up and down to move your paddle and hit the ball. Play against the computer and the first to get 11 points wins, classic. The designs below give an idea of the screens for the widget:
- Tap to Play - starting screen
- 3,2,1 - countdown to get yourself ‘ready’ to play.
- Playing screen - showcasing paddles, score, etc.
- WINner screen - rinse and repeat.
SCROLLER WIDGET
Now - it also occured to me that perhaps, it would be hard to play within the confines of a 2×2 widget, so I then came up with this novel Scroller widget. Imagine like a mechanical scroll wheel on a mouse, or a nice silver metal scroll wheel on a gadget and you get the idea. What if these control widgets could be linked to the game widget? So, you could control your paddle by swiping on the scroller widgets to interact with the Pong widget - thus having a better control and seeing the widget?
Hmm - I thought - maybe these could be useful not just for controlling your Pong session, but maybe they could be more general purpose? Could they control your volume on your phone? or the brightness of your screen? rather than pressing buttons or swiping and adjusting brightness, just scroll on the widget. Have more than one?
MULTIPLAYER
Remember those shareable widgets? Then I thought, playing Pong by yourself against the computer is no fun so what if you could play against a friend or someone in the community? Why not 2-player pong? You and a friend both have the widget, connect, and play, you control your paddle and see the other’s movements on your screen? In this mockup - I coloured the paddles different to give this concept and also thought about different orientation to the game itself with a horizontal paddle.
VIDEO SHOWCASE
Thanks for reading & watching, I hope you liked these concepts. Thanks to the commuinty for the inspiration.
