Time Cruise

Spaceship Earth 2 had crawled to a stop, development-wise. I didn't want to put in the work to make it perform better, and I didn't want to release something that just chewed through battery life. I was at a bit of a roadblock.

Then my family made plans to go on a cruise. 

The day before, with me all packed up, I decided to make a thematically appropriate watchface. I'd make a little cruise ship, sailing at sea, inside of a life raft. Use my time-changing idea from the SSE2 watchface to make the ship sail through the day. And because you don't really want to know what day it is when you're on the cruise, I added a simple little day count-up or count-down display. Just the right amount of information.

So, one-day project. How'd it go?

Planning & Asset Creation

By this point, I knew what I was doing when it came to watchface creation. You plan it out first in something like photoshop, which also allows you to create the assets required. Multiple layers for different options, exporting each layer as an image, and you've got everything ready to go. Now you just need to recreate the stack of layers in C, and then you're golden.

The sea, made in dark blue, with little waves made using some noise filters.

The sky, clear blue, with optional clouds and a little sun

The night sky, dark black with spattered stars and a full moon.

Simple rings, little life preserver borders.

The most complicated aspect was the ship itself - I wanted the cruise ship to match what we were boarding, the Disney Fantasy. So, I found as close as I could to a side profile of the ship, crunched it down to a low resolution, and traced it in pixel art to get something that would have all the major parts of the silhouette of the ship. Little bit of detail work, an extra layer for the lights at night, and tada! All done.

Just layer them together, tie in the necessary functionality (time, battery, counter, and time-relevant assets), and you get this:

(As an extra note, the pebble screenshot command for the emulator actually washes out the colors intentionally, to try and make it match what you'd see on the screen of an actual device)

Add in a configuration page, built with Clay...

And that's it! The project's done, and I'm able to use it on the cruise the next day.

But my family isn't.

You see, the rest of them also had pebbles - Pebble Times, with color but rectangular screens, unlike the Pebble Time Round, which is what I designed this around.

Quick Hack Time.

The app garnered a small, but warm response. It's a very, very narrow target demographic.

It's available from the Pebble appstore here: Time Cruise | Watchface (rebble.io)