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Episode 1, Eric Krause

season 3, episode 1 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest eric krause, riot games league of legends, gaming, galaxy store in this episode, not only do we talk about the beginnings of riot games and their award-winning mobile game, league of legends, wild rift, but how riot games has grown to become more than just a gaming company listen download this episode topics covered riot games beginning league of legends franchise best of galaxy store awards, best strategy game wild rift developing for mobile publishing on galaxy store samsung relationship game development and marketing wild rift music esports netflix animated series arcane working at riot games diversity and inclusion helpful links riot games website - riotgames com riot games linkedin - linkedin com/company/riot-games riot games twitter - twitter com/riotgames riot games facebook - facebook com/riotgames riot games instagram - instagram com/riotgames league of legends esports - lolesports com eric krause linkedin - linkedin com/in/erkrause samsung developers homepage - developer samsung com samsung developers newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developers blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developers news - developer samsung com/news samsung developers facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developers instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developers twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developers youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developers linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode one on today's show, i'm joined by eric krause, global head of marketing for the league of legends group at riot games not only do we chat about the latest success around wild rift, their award-winning mobile game for the league of legends franchise, but also riot games unique process for game development, and how diversity and inclusion play an important part of riots culture internally and within the gaming and entertainment communities well, yeah, and all of the music you'll hear in today's episode, it's from the wild rift soundtrack enjoy hey, eric, i want to welcome you to the to the podcast eric krause 00 57 thank you for having me it's a pleasure tony morelan 01 00 who is eric krause? eric krause 01 04 good question my wife, i think is asking the same question i am german so by my accent, you might be like, where is he from? so i'm super passionate about gaming you know, we're really trying to be part of, you know, making people feel better to be a gamer all around the world but beyond that really love technology, talking about anything technology so that's why i'm super excited to be here talking about, you know, partnership with samsung, because samsung is known for technology, but also loved cars so i'm very stereotypical german that way, because i also really love football and i mean, real football, not the american football thing tony morelan 01 40 no, i you know, i appreciate that they did bring the mls to the us for all of the soccer fans here but yeah, i can only imagine you're probably a big fan of the european leagues eric krause 01 51 yes, i still wake up early in the morning and watch some of the games the good ones in europe still live? it's an addiction, maybe? i don't know but it's a good one tony morelan 02 02 so what is the what is your team? what team do you follow? eric krause 02 06 being german, i have to go with a german team so that's brucea, dortmund right now a second plays unfortunately right behind bayern munich but maybe this year, maybe we have a chance i'm cheering on i'm going to sit there with my jersey on when they play and i have a small figurine, that is like dressed up as a barista don't want a character and depending on how they play, that the finger is allowed to look into the living room? or if they badly have to turn around and then just stare the wall it's kind of the you don't you didn't do well so go into the tony morelan 02 37 so what is the current state? is he is he looking positive and into the into the future? is he in a timeout? eric krause 02 43 it just turned around? actually, because two matches ago, they last had a turnaround but the last one they actually won so it's allowed to look back into the living room yes tony morelan 02 54 nice so riot games, you are global head of marketing for league of legends tell me what exactly is that role? eric krause 03 01 yeah so in that role? no, i have the pleasure of overseeing all the amazing teams that do all the crazy and awesome marketing work across liga legends on pc, and wildrose, which is the old version of liga legends and we've kind of created this as a group, because it's kind of the core of of league of legends and that's how people perceive it and it's actually very similar in terms of what we're trying to promise to players, right in terms of, hey, if you play this type of game, this is what you will get out of this in the state ultra competition i had and that is kind of the whole purpose of that group to really defining you know, what does that competitive aspects of league of legends look like? what does it mean to, you know, build a platform ecosystem that's built around celebrating mastery? sure but also, through league of legends, a lot of people do get to know our characters, and our champions that they know and love so we're also taking care of that, right, making sure that, you know, as they, as our fans, you know, have their champions that they really cheer on to give them as much love as possible for the champion that they love tony morelan 04 11 so, yeah, yeah, no, i know, it's a huge, huge community how long have you been in that role at riot games? eric krause 04 18 fairly recently, actually, um, you know, i was, i was given that role last summer and before that, i was actually leading up the marketing team that launched all draft, so okay, from that roll into this new role that started to exist as of last summer got it tony morelan 04 38 and you've been at riot games for how long? for eric krause 04 41 over five years, and it's so weird, because i always think of myself as somebody fairly new to riot sure but when i now meet new rioters, they're like, oh, we've been there for five years you're a veteran, and then myself, like, don't say that to me that's not true i feel like i just joined yesterday but yeah, it's over five years tony morelan 05 02 wow, no, but you are originally from germany so there has to be some sort of journey that's led you from your home country of germany, to i understand you now live in southern california eric krause 05 12 yeah, right now i do live in sunny los angeles and the passion for gaming eventually, you know, moved me over here because at the beginning, during college, i started to work for an agency that was working with ea back at the time and through that i became a community manager being coming and kind of the phase and local go to person for various games and franchises that ea had in central europe and eventually, through that work, ea was like, well, can't you just move over to the west coast, because you're working with all these teams already and you're, you're, you're flying over so many times, sure, just move, just come over and i did that and that was more than 10 years ago, at this point, our move to los angeles, and from there kept working for a couple more years, at ea working on things like mass effect, command and conquer and others, and moved on actually to a korean company, also in gaming, which gave me a new side of learning about like free to play and life service operations, which obviously is a big part now of gaming and then eventually, that led me to working at riot which, as we said, it's more than five years ago, which crazy to say, tony morelan 06 32 wow, now riot got their start back in the in the 2000s correct? eric krause 06 36 2006 yeah, as a tiny, tiny startup just with a with an idea and, and now it's like, it's so obvious, but back then it wasn't tony morelan 06 47 yeah, cuz i know, back in the early 2000s, you know, when gaming really started, you know, becoming extremely popular gamers were kind of looked upon as this is just like this, this little hobby, and, you know, go spend your free time but i mean, with esports, it is just blown up over the years eric krause 07 05 yeah, totally and i can proudly say that we're part of that i have because we believe that and we actually spend ridiculous amounts of effort to really promote and build up the professional esports circuit around liga legends and when we did that originally, which is also now more 10 years ago, people laughed up on us i had they're like, what is this? like? this is not a sport, right? like, it's just four people in the basement i had like, doing these things and now we look at it and you're like, yeah, if we look at our world championship i had has more viewers than most sporting events that americans know and love, like nba finals, we have more viewers in the nba finals, right? that's so easy it has come a long, long way since then tony morelan 07 51 so league of legends, they got their start around 2009 set, right, the first eric krause 07 57 version of the game came out 2009 because over the years, it has changed drastically for the better if you look at clips of the original league legends in 2009, it's pretty rough but again, it was 2009 you know, that's the beauty of life services, and also being really player focused, right, is that the game has come a long way not because you know, we necessarily had the most grandest vision for it but because once you put something out there, your players will tell you, well, we like this, we don't like that and we just kept listening and that's kind of our thing and we'll keep listening and evolve the game, you know, based on how our players really think, you know, what they believe is best tony morelan 08 40 league of legends has become a franchise and i know there's a whole bunch of games that have come out of that talk a bit about some of those individual league of legend games, eric krause 08 49 for talking about the games, but and how they've been talking about the ecosystem behind it i think it's important to understand why because most of the time, like yeah, just you know, making more games cool, you're making more money, right? that's, that's the traditional answer, if successful, if he just makes more of it for us, it's a little bit different because what motivates us really, is to create that ecosystem that allows people to express fandom very differently, okay, because right now, you know, as we all human beings, we all have different ways and how we play, right how we consume entertainment so we want it to be built something a large ecosystem that people can be really proud of, because it's not just forcing them to play one game to remain to be a fan of this thing that they might have started playing a 10 years ago but now they all these other different ways that depending on how their life changes, how they interest changes, how the new friends might play, different things are sure want to be entertainment and things we want to build them an ecosystem that it can be proud of and that's how we started to be like, okay, part of that is not only to make music and tv shows and what that's also making more games, right and through that lens, we actually announced a bunch of them doing a 10th year anniversary of league of legends, which was a big surprise for people and a good surprise and there, we announced a bunch of games ranging from like legends from terra, which is, you know, a card game that we made digital card game, then also tft team fight tactics, which is this auto bed law genre, which is a new upcoming one, which is really kind of chess meets, you know, game strategy put on top of it it's really, really weird one, but if you really lost strategy, like that, one is for you but we also announced brand new things through the lens of, you know, working with indie companies to really make games that are go really deep into very specific area that riot probably wouldn't make through our riot forged label and those have been received pretty phenomenal as well and last but not least, we also announced our first new ip, which is valorant, which we've launched now, as well, which is right now, first person, tactical shooter, tony morelan 11 06 it's really interesting so you've got this franchise, and you found all these different ways for different types of personalities to in to engage in the game so you know, from runeterra, being that that collective card game, it's similar to something like magic the gathering, but in a digital format and then what i'd love to hear about is how, you know, you're looking at the mobile space, creating a game to be played on mobile devices and that's where samson kind of comes into play with the game wild riff so i love seeing how you've taken this, this single game league of legends and turned it into a franchise to really expand the community and in the different ways that people can play and interact eric krause 11 43 part of it as we think about all these new games has been mobile, i'm actually pretty committed to mobile, because i'd wildwood is one that is built natively for mobile, which was one of the really big challenges for us but also, as we thought about some of our other games, like legends of runeterra, team fight tactics, they all have a mobile component of it, too so you can actually play it on a mobile phone as well because that's where, right if you think about trying to give players what they want, if you think about even today, right, the way people consume entertainment, which i include gaming in, has changed drastically in the earlier days, people have really made dedicated time for it, either, like, i'm going to be on a pc, thursday night for four hours, you know, i'm going to meet up with all my friends, you know, online, and then we'll just play or spend time on a couch or, you know, really make a block available, where i can just watch movies and whatnot but now, it really changed right now, you know that the trend that we're seeing that we're trying to lean into is, you know, people just whenever live gives them a small sliver of time yeah, in that moment, no matter what the situation is, people want to have the highest quality form of entertainment available to them no matter if it's on pc, tablet, tv, mobile phone, right, truly, wherever it is and that change pushes us as game developers to adopt, and this case to really embrace mobile ai, because it's not just about that trend it's also for a lot of people mobile is kind of the first and maybe only gaming platform they ever own yeah, so for us, it's also so important because they're all these hundreds of millions of people all around the world, that define who they are, as a gamer through the lens of a mobile phone and we want to be there because we want to show them what it could look like to be a gamer through the lens of riot, because we really want to make sure that they get the best possible experience and that's why we've started to embrace mobile and this took as a really long time, arguably too long because it's paired with other beliefs that we have, that we really want to deliver the highest quality form of entertainment and mobile took us a while to get there at the beginning, it was like the technology wasn't really there for us to have the capabilities to create these deep and engaging experiences because we didn't just want to use rip and you know, put something on a phone that when people look at me like right, what you put on a phone has nothing to do with the game or the ip i know and love over here so where’s that game? like the gameplay that made that pc game so special? we wanted to make sure that when people pick it up, and they're like, hey, this is a league of legends game that the mechanics to the quality that they can be like proudly say yes, yeah, this is a league of legends game so it took us a little bit longer to get there but now it's definitely part of how we think about the entertainment world right that mobile is a big part and arguably more growing part compared to pc and console tony morelan 14 50 so last year, riot games won a best of galaxy store award best strategy game for league of legends wild rift, tell me what did it mean to win that award? eric krause 15 01 people can see it right now i'm still smiling just kidding about it, because it's so awesome to see i called validation i because you can say all day long, right? that, hey, we're trying to, you know, really build the best things possible on a device on a platform to make players proud but it's really hard sometimes to quantify that right, as hundreds and hundreds of people are working on this day in day out so when do you know that you're probably on the right track? and one part is, obviously, players will tell you if they're happy or not yeah, but the other one is also, you know, recognition by the industry and that's why this actually means so much to us, as a team that is working on the game because it is that signal, i would like, hey, you know, samsung galaxy said, you know, this is one of the best games of the year and that makes us proud and that's why we should not only share that with, obviously, our fans, to make sure that they're like, hey, you know, we won this thank you guys, all out there yeah, to make it ultimately happen because without players, we wouldn't do these things but there's also now a very important part of, you know, how we think about the game and trying to recruit people because it's also the thing i'd like, as we all recruit for talent, i have so many choices of course, using it like, hey, this is an award-winning team definitely helps riot as well as a company to get more super awesome talent and to make even better experiences down the road so it's a very important thing for us yeah, tony morelan 16 33 i know, i've done a lot of these interviews with past winners this is the first time that i've heard that a company actually uses that award is a way to entice and encourage, you know, talent to come their way so while griff is fairly new, when was it actually released, eric krause 16 50 radware was released or started to release in fall 2020 and as they started to, because what we did is we launched in multiple waves, we started in fall 2020 launching in southeast asia and slowly over the course of time, up to our more recent launch in china, we just did a wave by wave and start to expand the availability of wildlife globally tony morelan 17 17 what's the what's the reason behind that sort of rolling release? eric krause 17 21 it was more of a technical nature, trying to because you find the balance right between when is everything totally ready for a global launch? versus when we have something we believe in? how fast can we deliver player value? yeah so finding a balance, sometimes it's this inner pole between you because one side i really wanted, like, don't do it, don't do it other than that, go push it out, push it out, of course so we decided to do that way to really, you know, get more player feedback along the way earlier, but also still give them experience in the earliest stages of the rollout that we still believe then being a good experience for them tony morelan 17 59 got it so it's almost like doing a beta release for software? pretty much yes so you know, knowing that league of legends was extremely popular on pc, and then you decided to come up with this mobile version wild rift, tell me about what is the process for building a mobile version game? eric krause 18 16 it was a long one you know, we spent several years trying to figure it out, really and what it led to was rebuild everything because the first instinct, right, when you have something that is working on pc is all let's just see what we can port over right? and, sure, we tried, but it didn't feel right when we want to be on a platform, right? when we want to put a name on one of our games, we want to proudly say that this is the best we can do it it's that's the best possible experience you can have right? and but just porting it, that didn't feel right, because a pc game wasn't made for the different screen so we decided we need to rebuild everything, using a different engine, you know, rebuilding all the art assets because when we started that approach, that's when it started to really click in terms of making use of the capabilities that a phone has, and also making sure that it just feels right, because now the thing is with the touchscreen, right? you can almost feel your champions and i obviously say that in a crazy way but if you just think about right like now you drag like an ability of a champion really on the screen, you see exactly what the tell the champion reacts to it it's almost some degree more direct the interaction with your champion, so it needed to feel super crisp so we decided to rebuild everything but it also gave us the opportunity to touch up a few areas of the game that you know, as you can imagine, at that point, you know, the game being more than 10 years old on pc that didn't hold up, you know, as well over the course of time so we actually started to rebuild a bunch of things to even like in terms of what champions look like, visually, to get them kind of on par with a modern for 21st century, it was kind of an opportunity as well and for us tony morelan 20 11 yeah, no, you know, we are really proud and excited that you guys decided to bring your game over to the galaxy store tell me are there any unique aspects or optimizations to the to the game that fans download from galaxy store? eric krause 20 24 yes, i'm not going to voice with the technical details but at the end of it all, is we wanted to make sure that no matter if you have a high end, samsung phone, or if you have, you know, a more entry level one that the game really gets the most out of the phone is that you get the smoothest possible experience and that require actually really working with samsung, they were super open for him to really work with us and help on optimizing the engine, but also working with us on some new sdk functionality that really allowed to make sure that the fight between terminals, like how much heat is being generated on one end, but also, how much power do we really put into all the components like cpu gpu, that we always find the right balance, that no matter, you know, how heated the fight is that your phone doesn't overheat, yet still gives you the smoothest experience, and been working endlessly for a couple of years, you know, with everybody at samsung, and we believe, you know, we achieved what we wanted to achieve, which is really giving you the best possible game experience on a galaxy device tony morelan 21 37 yeah, and knowing that, you know, we have so many different form factors with our traditional phone, as well as the z fold, and the z flip, all of which can be used to play wildlife correct? eric krause 21 48 actually, in fact, i do play wild rifts on my phone tony morelan 21 52 that's great so tell me about this relationship with samsung how did that first start? eric krause 21 58 it's fun sorry, because you know, samsung and right, we're thinking very similarly, about the space and that is really, how can we provide the best possible entertainment experience on the go? i had that is true for samsung, right through their products but it's also true for riot with our games and software so through that those early conversations, we pretty quickly identify like, it's pretty obvious for us to work together on this site and from there, it was all history, i had started to partner and really figuring out the ways on, you know what that means for us as two companies collaborating with the sole purpose of giving gamers the best possible experience on a mobile device and that partnerships now ongoing for like, last two, three years tony morelan 22 47 yeah, that's one thing i do love, you know, working at samsung, they really do push that the partnership side of things i mean, i made myself totally available to the community when it comes to my areas of expertise at samsung and they've really pushed out with a lot of the people here so it's not just that, you know, we're a platform for you to deliver your content but we want to work with you to make the experience truthfully better for all those that are using our devices in your content so with wild ruth being such a new game, i'm sure it is extremely important and challenging to do that, that initial marketing, to promote your game so tell me about some of the tools and techniques that you guys are doing to help let the community know that hey, there is wild riff, and it's time for you to play eric krause 23 28 yeah, absolutely um, so in today's world, but when you think about it, you know, you have to really be where players are, you can't be as selective anymore as you might want it to be 1015 20 years ago, and that really is the guiding thing for us when we thought about, you know, marketing the game and you know, celebrating the launch of it and specifically being a mobile game what does it mean being where players are for us that was, you know, heavy emphasis on social media, on content creators, and just general video platforms, because that is the core circle of you know, how people on mobile phones consume content these days so that was a very big investment of ours, to really lean into that, you know, and work with the right parties but the other thing that's exciting is when you think about mobile is, you know, the capabilities that it brings that you weren't really able to do on a pc, even when it comes to marketing what i mean by that is like, guys, a great example is, you know, using ar and vr technology, you know, on a mobile phone, it's actually pretty straightforward so we played with a bunch actually made microsites for events and launch events we turned them into three dimensional things you can actually walk around in and up there we did 180-degree videos so as you watched it depending on you know, what you were looking you saw a different thing of the scenery and of the story being told that video, and all these fun things i did you can start doing and creatively unlock if you embrace mobile as a platform, not only what the game is app, but also how people consume content, right? and then the other aspect being a mobile game specifically as it sounds, it's mobile, right? it's on the go deck will have it everywhere, even real life so for us, it was also important component to figure out what, how can we promote it, where people are out there when they use a phone, right, so not just being on the phone, but in the actual real-world context so obviously, with the covid, 19 situation happening was a little more tricky for us to do so but we still were able to find, you know, arguably great and yet safe ways to do that in the real world like, for example, in southeast asia, in some markets is all about food, right? like people love food there, they'll go to street vendors, you know, just grab something and even make it a social hangout space, i will just meet around a food cart sure, we really leaned into that aspect in southeast asia and actually created a campaign that celebrated some of the fruit that you find in the game on the map, brought it to real life actually created something that looked like it but felt very specifically, i guess, different, sure, and created an activation around it and we're really proud of that one because again, not only were we able to pull off, despite all the constraints around us but it also was more recently recognized, winning a grand clio, for one of the best marketing experiences over the last couple tony morelan 26 26 of years wow, that's exciting and for those that don't know, the clio awards are basically the oscars when it comes to marketing and design so and i understand you also did something pretty creative with youtube, as far as an event, so yes, eric krause 26 41 we also did something, youtube, which we also want to clear for and that was really the concept of while people are waiting to play the game, because we're doing it in rollout stages, like one wave after the other what can we give people in a cool interactive form, to kind of experience the game without playing it and wanting to come to mind is as part of the game key objective, and the game is bare nasher, which is this massive, giant warm thingy, that that you can slain as a team and we made a game on youtube, about that experience but it was kind of an all versus one kind of experience we're all players watching the stream had to come together, and actually work together to in this case, slay and bear nowshera through various inputs that they could give through chat and whatever the chat inputs were that the community decided something would happen on the screen, in terms of fighting him with a specific attack called different champions and for help heal yourself and things like that so it's kind of a massive, interactive game, that that people play it and it was really cool to kind of again, test the waters with what's possible, with all the platforms out there tony morelan 27 59 wow, what a great and super creative way to truthfully build a community to, you know, act as one so all total to date, how many downloads? how many users would you say i've played while drift? eric krause 28 11 it's hard to say, but it's definitely high up there to 10s of millions but i think the best number that describes you know, when we think about league of legends, you know how big it is, is a number we just recently announced and that was for the end of last year, we had 180 million people in a given month, play, you know, a league of legends game wow and the majority of that is driven by wild drift actually, i have because, you know, people were waiting for having finally a mobile part of this ecosystem available to them and that that is really, you know, the promise that we delivered upon, giving them something that they could proudly call legal legends is now you know, available on a mobile phone, because it is league of legends, it is the core game and people pay that back to us by coming, downloading and playing the game and we're really proud that we were able to expand the ecosystem for our players the way we did tony morelan 29 15 that's amazing and that is that is huge, especially for a franchise that just shows the longevity of the of the brand, after all these years to still be creating new experiences for the community and seeing the community grow that big eric krause 29 28 it's the proof point that the product lifecycle curves that they teach people during the mba is that they can be defied if you just really have a customer focus, tony morelan 29 38 but how do you guys come up with your ideas for games? the beauty eric krause 29 41 of making video games is really, if you can dream it up, you can make it sure and so that really the creativity in your mind is kind of the limiting factor here and because of that inspiration can truly come from anywhere for making a game and finding like what what's fun about different experience, being it reading a book, you know, watching just our fans talk on youtube about something, right, playing a board game, or just generally just sitting there in a rocking chair and you know, thinking about, like, what could be better in the world, you know, truly, ideas can come from anywhere and that's the exciting thing about gaming as a medium, because it's like creating these things that are interactive, for people to then explore themselves and be surprised and delighted by and because of that, you know, an all push for finding new ways to give players what they would want and that is that more robust ecosystem, we now have invested into a pretty robust pipeline of r&d games so that visit different genres, to really make sure that one day we can give as many players as possible, kind of the ecosystem that they deserve tony morelan 30 54 i love what you said about if you can dream it, you can make it a game and that's true, because i remember the first time i picked up cards against humanity, absolutely love playing the game and as soon as i was done at a notepad, i'm like, okay, how can i make my version of cards against humanity, it just was so simple but so, so much fun and that was true you know, for many years, i've often come up with ideas for, you know, game boards, or collectible, you know, items even going so far to pitch some of these ideas none of them worked out i ended up deciding to go into tech but yeah, i love what you said that if you can dream it, you can make it eric krause 31 33 yeah and that's the thing i had, it's like it all, it doesn't have to always work out, right? even was trying to see if there's something there with your idea as crazy that might be sure there's a high chance it will not work out that's the same for us in our r&d pipeline and just because we're starting to invest into a game, it doesn't mean that we're going to make it ibm has a high chance that as we go down that rabbit hole, and we're like, yeah, we weren't really able to find the fun or like, yeah, i don't really know how to make that game it just possibility i so there are a bunch of things that are being canceled internally or put on a shelf but the things that you learn from it, probably inspire something else and that's something else might become the next big thing it might change humanity forever beyond yeah because a lot of the things that we now take for granted in all worlds, sometimes were accidents, i will people will actually try to invent or find a different solution to different problem and then as a side product, they invented x, right? yes and that is what's always keep trying tony morelan 32 41 so when it comes to like developing a game and pitching that, that that concept i can imagine it must be a little bit like actually pitching a movie i mean, with storyboards, storylines, characters, i mean, games have become so involved that that's how i think it would be but tell me, is it? is it anything like, you know, pitching an idea for a movie? eric krause 33 01 it's, tony, it's definitely a process because a lot of people think about making games, just pay a bunch of people get together and just make a thing, and then they release it right and sure, that could be a way but probably will not give anybody the results they're looking for and players probably would look at me like, what is the scam? is it's not fun, it doesn't feel right so that's why it's really going through that process of multiple stages that kind of really stack on top of each other in a sequential, right, because we want to make sure that first, the core idea of what makes that game fun, potentially, is really thought out i've really thought and it goes through the process and figure out like, hey, do we believe that this will be true? then it kind of when that is happening goes to the next stage of like, can we actually make that game before even really making the game? because that's the other thing you might dream up this crazy idea, but nobody has an idea how to actually make it clear and that will also be problematic so that's really about focusing on all the kinks i'd like so what would an animated character look like? and feel like? how much work? is it actually to make it or whatever it is like, what would this open world feel like? and what's the visual quality target? we're aiming for all these things, trying to figure out these answers to all these questions to before the game actually goes into full production that's when you actually make the game and again, it seems a little counterintuitive, right? because people like well, why waste all the time at the beginning but it's really part of the process for us to make sure that when we release a game as riot, that players can be proud of it yeah, when they pick it up it doesn't just feel awesome but it really changes and provides value to their lives, right as a gamer we want to have that high borns high bar that's why not every game will make it to that pipeline it's okay everybody knows that but that's really important aspects of it tony morelan 34 55 so how long would you say it takes to go from concept to actually a published game? eric krause 35 00 it's really depends on, you know, the genre, the type of game, the scene, the scope of it, either you can see games that are actually done in two years but you can also find games that will take five years plus, i had to go through that pipeline so it's really variable based on kind of the project tony morelan 35 18 and that is quite an investment, you know, to have to forecast out like, hey, this is we're not going to see a return on this for another three to five years that just shows you the commitment that riot has eric krause 35 29 well, i think we're right, it's not it's not even that it's not that we're thinking about, hey, you know, what's, what's the investment for just putting a game through r&d? because the philosophy of riot, it's about that long term value to the player ecosystem? sure that that is kind of our very first way of thinking about it so rather than thinking for us, it's like, okay, it doesn't take two or five years to put it through, it's more like, once it's out, can this be a 10 plus your game that really pushes the genre forward, that really changes the game exchange that really adds to our ecosystem in a long term way, and provides value through that that's how we think about it and that makes it a little bit different in terms of sure how we approach games but again, that that's how the whole belief of the company is built around that and it actually makes for in our eyes for better outcomes for players tony morelan 36 22 sure, sure you know, there's a lot of competition out there with the with gaming, what has been your your strategy for discoverability? eric krause 36 31 it is, obviously, you know, people have choice there's no way around that but there are a couple of things that that we try to do a really put our flag down in terms of making sure that players actively seek out riot games, because obviously, there's the obvious answer of like, hey, you spent all this money on media on user acquisition, right? i mean, that's a fair way of doing it and riot is participating in that way right of pushing discoverability but there's also the other aspect, right? if you do create an environment that people cherish, i've been through a super recognizable ip that has stepped or through really providing highest quality entertainment options available, no matter the platform, all of a sudden, you get players that want to play your games yeah, i had that actively, you know, looking for the next strike game, not only for themselves, but even to the degree to talking to the friends about it and that is kind of the other part to us, either naturally, probably the leading thing, actually, for us to really invest into these high quality, ip driven ecosystems, that gives players the best experience and then through that kind of grow from the inside out what were people who are in within the ecosystem are happy to go out to their friends, you're like, hey, this is an amazing game, you should play it with me and that is the two components for us but as i said, the latter one being the more focus piece of tony morelan 38 01 it yeah and i think in another way, it's also evident how you don't have to pay to play that there is an opportunity for people who just want to pick it up and, and have a little fun with it but yeah, obviously, you know, you can generate revenue through wild rift so what has been your strategy for generating revenue? eric krause 38 20 all goes back to when it comes to how do we make money because yes, we do have to make money one way or the other because our philosophy is we want money to reinvest back into the ecosystem sure for us, we don't want to just do it in a way that feels bad that's like a big thing like, if somebody gives us money, we want a player to feel good about it, because they got great value and that means we don't want to partake in some of the more predatory monetization models that exist out there so as gamers, for example, you know, you hated when there are these energy systems that limit the amount of time you can actually play a game, or you have to like refill your energy or whatever to, you know, play another match or something like that we don't do any of that we don't want to limit how many times you can play we also don't want to sell anything that give somebody an unfair advantage in terms of making them stronger, or having all of a sudden different abilities that you don't have access to so it's really about, you know, allowing people to monetize to do by things that are more appearance based, more vanity based because that way it's about them deepening their almost relationship with their favorite champion with a favorite character and that doesn't have really any impact on somebody else playing with them in the sense of being unfair, but instead gives, you know our players actually more diversity for the champion that they already no love, and more different appeal, and almost celebrating it with them that they have gone so deep, you know, with the champions and that's really the majority of, you know, for us and how we think about monetization yeah and that is really the focus for us tony morelan 40 16 now, you know, the user experience on mobile is different than it is on pc what were some of the challenges that you guys face when, when it came to designing a mobile game? eric krause 40 26 it's, it's very different, right? that's why we really, really had to rebuild it in terms of design as you have a smaller screen, sure, but also completely very different input mechanics and how you steer, i had a champion so really rethinking all of that was a really big part of the prototyping phase of the game, to redo even some of the champion mechanics to better fit the, you know, mobile environment, to again, really make the best out of it or another great example, for the design experiences, you know, average game on pc is probably 30 minutes to play league of legends but nobody wants to spend 30 minutes, you know, into a heated match on a phone, actually, for people that think about phone more so is like, more bite sized experience that they can have on? sure so that was a big thing for us it's also well, from a design perspective, it's like, oh, how do we bring it down to let's say, 15 minutes i to make it more bite sized, without losing the core experience that people know and love from pc so that was like, as an example for, you know, how we thought about the design problems to solve going to mobile, but again, to really make use of mobile, not just a software for the sake of it, but to really leverage, you know, what mobile is giving you then when it comes to publishing is also very different we self-publish, you know, the game, on pc and that obviously, is only means that, you know, we use our own tools, everything sure but if you think about mobile, and we work with great partners like samsung, i had to get the game out to make sure that people have a great convenient and safe environment to get the game from so there, it's actually for us learning all the ins and outs of the tools and the capabilities and even working, you know, with samson to figure out if there's any functionality that might be missing, that would be cool to make it even better experience for players so that was actually also a big switch for us, that we had to learn and really invest into to teach ourselves what that looks like sure and then also the marketing aspects of it all as well you can't just copy whatever you're doing on pc from a marketing front and just call it day i like yeah, we did it cool because it's not only the way again, people consume media slightly different but as far as i can go back to opportunity, because people might notice that, you know, the game is actually called league of legends wall drift it's not just called league of legends or league of legends it also looks slightly different feels slightly different and that was purpose because as we think about wild rifts within the ecosystem that we've built, while two of more so is kind of to inspire the next generation of legal legends fans so what does that mean, for us, as we, as people consider playing us or not? yeah, are the changes that we should be making to be more appealing? and that's what we did because also the game is slightly different in some detail mechanics, we didn't want to mislead our core fans as well, but completely saying hey, they exactly the same because they're not core fans will immediately be like, hey, this ability, eric, that's that one is different so don't call this exactly collections, because, you know, that's slightly off and that's, that's, that's awesome, because our fans are as dedicated so we also didn't want to mislead them hence, also part of the marketing experience being slightly different be like i know, this is league of legends while drift, which still totally deserving of the name league of legends because yeah, it is that core experience, but it's still slightly enough different to give it that different tone tony morelan 44 01 yeah now, you know, one of the things that stood out for me when i first played the game, was the music i mean, it was extremely cinematic so tell me a little bit about the music of league of legends wild rift eric krause 44 13 yeah it's so interesting what music can do to an overall experience i remember, i had to play test at some point and it wasn't a music it was like a bug it was like, pre before release and it was so interesting to me because it felt so wrong but initially, i couldn't pinpoint what's wrong with it, because i actively didn't notice that the music was missing but it really felt i was like, what's going on? is this this doesn't feel right and then eventually, we were like, oh, yeah, the music is not playing any of this i'm like, ah, yeah, that and that now i feel it i and that's the thing it's, you know, most of the time people don't really think actively about music, yet it plays such a big part to connect you better to the experience you're having to how can music be part of that emotional connection to what you're doing so it's not just some fireworks going off on the screen but that also that you feel that if something is on the line, the music should help tell you that at least subconsciously like, hey, something's on the line but the same, so it's like, if you go back to, you know, your home base, your fountain in the game, the music policy tell you like, hey, take a breather, right? it's okay, like, this is a safe space and that's really how to think about music i'd like making that like a way to connect better with the experience, even though people don't actively notice tony morelan 45 35 and all of the music that you're hearing in today's podcast, is from the league of legends wildlife soundtrack so now that you've worked with samsung, so closely on bringing your game to the galaxy store, what advice can you give developers that would like to do the same? yeah, eric krause 45 51 i mean, being on mobile, for me is about reaching massive audiences, massive audiences that use their phone to really define who they are as a gamer and when you think about it that way, samsung is a massive part of it, i had, it's one of the largest phone manufacturers in the world dedicated to creating the best possible experience on the go and that lens, kind of, at least for me, thinks about as like, and it's a no brainer, i had to be on the galaxy store, especially, you know, as we found out through our experience, that the extra work required to do so it's actually very minimal so it's a great value add, add to reaching, you know, more players, and eventually more fans of your products, through again, a lens of quality and pushing experience forward so i guess the short answer is just do it tony morelan 46 51 wonderful that's great so tell me what is in the future for riot games eric krause 46 57 our ceo, nicolo, he just recently actually shared a blog post about that on riot games com that kind of spilled the beans a little bit of our next five plus year journey that we're taking on as riot games and because for us, it's really about that expansion of the ecosystem and how can we, again, make it better to be a player? how can we find better ways for people to express fandom? how can we give them more experiences, beyond the ones that we've already provided to give them a more diverse way of interacting with riot games, league of legends, ip, or maybe even new ips, and says long blog posts, it talks about all these things in detail but that's kind of really what you can expect for us to keep chasing, you know, our players and then needs that will see us invest in our existing games, but also many new ones across many new genres we will really push esports further beyond our games, because we believe that esports is just an integral part of the entertainment environment in the future i had so we'll try to innovate and push forward there but also explore different mediums i mean, we've just done it with arcane, that released on netflix, just several months ago, but expect us to do more things that are not just games again, the pursuit of providing super rich ecosystem that people can be proud of as a fan tony morelan 48 27 yeah, so arcane is the this new animated series on netflix i actually watched a little bit of it, it is hauntingly beautiful tell it tell us a little bit about that eric krause 48 36 you might think about like why is riot making a tv show? right? again, it goes back to you know not everybody has time to play games all the time yet, they're still a fan of thing that that you made many, maybe many years ago so how can we give them like a connection to their fandom back without telling them hey, play this new game or play this old game and that's where it is really about entering different mediums that have different accessibility bars miss case tv so for us though, and through that lens was very important to make arcane as kind of that first statement nardone to expand the universe really beyond just games for people to think about the league of legends, ip and ecosystem as kind of this multimedia experience that you know, crosses all these different mediums and this was the first kind of statement that we made and it goes really into the story of some of our most beloved champions and their background but there was also made in a way that if you are a fan of league of legends, and you couldn't really convince others why you're so crazy about legal legends that you could give them that show i'd be like, hey, let's watch it together it in an attempt for you to explain, hey, this is why league of legends is awesome, because you can watch it without any context of the league of legends world sure and that was also important to us to give our fans kind of an invitation that they could send to their friends and loved ones to be like, hey, you want to share my passion? he has a different way, how we can do that? tony morelan 50 21 yeah, so it really is obvious that riot games has become an entertainment company, not just a gaming company how big how many employees work for riot games eric krause 50 34 at this point, we're well past 3000 and still growing quickly because as you can imagine, right, it's creating all these dreams making them try to reality for our fans, you know, is requires a lot of people and, you know, we're not shy of investing into those impossible dreams come true across all of our offices, right? it's not just you know, here in la i know, we have offices all around the world and as part of our next evolution of riot, you know, we've seen more offices and games being made all around the world, and experiences being made all around the world it's really, you know, also capitalize on, you know, there's not just one type of gamer, depending on where you go around the world what means to be a gamer also does look and feel different so that is also something that we have to really think about, as we expand into, you know, the future of what riot can look like tony morelan 51 33 yeah, so people listening to the podcast if they're interested in working for riot games so what's the best way for them to learn about how to apply for a position at riot games? eric krause 51 43 yeah, i mean, you can find us on almost all the networks you can think of but generally, the two ones i do recommend is either go to riot games comm where you can learn more about riot, but also, you know, what we're up to, and you know, what positions we have open but also like on things like linkedin, where we all have our own presence and you can also check out you know, blog posts there and as well as our openings, and also even connect with writers and ask them about their experiences tony morelan 52 11 that's great and i'll be sharing all of the urls in the in the show notes for not just rankings, but also for wild rift and, and your social handles so with diversity and inclusion being such an important aspect of our of our society, right now, tell me what is riot games doing related to d and i eric krause 52 32 it's a very important question, tony and for riot, you know, the two lenses that that i described to people on how we are thinking about diversity inclusion the first part is obviously the one that people probably think first and foremost off, which is riot as an employer and, you know, me talk about my personal experience here, the way that, you know, riot has invested over the last couple of years into that space in terms of time, but you know, money and just general resourcing has been phenomenal i've never seen, you know, such a heavy investment being made to do the right thing because yes, it did require a wake-up moment for us as a company but that moment was really turned an opportunity, i had to make better to be a writer to work at riot games so now you know, it, there's not just an d and i team that exists, but also, you know, what they do and how they impact the company is part of all the processes all around i to ensure that no matter what might be, that riot is a welcoming, and fair environment for everybody and that is an extremely big investment, and actually really proud to have seen the reaction to arguably, you know, the not-so-great moments that we had in the past so i'm sure that that makes me actually pretty proud, based on my experience but the other part also that sometimes people forget when it comes to diversity and inclusion is right as a game creator, right? because with that, you kind of have a responsibility as creatives to create experiences for millions of millions of players around the world that kind of allowed them to relate or in better set like that, feel seen it through the things that you make sure, because you can quickly fall into a pit trap or, you know, just create the same things over and over again, that fit a worldview of specific group, but makes other people feel left out yeah and that's part of the responsibility that you have as a game creator so as part of the development process, to promote diversity and inclusion through that content that you make and a very recent example actually is valorant our shooter that we have because they're one of the most recent champions that just launched or agents it's called, is actually a female karen actor inspired by filipino culture because we want to make sure that you know, if you are, you know, not just one, but in the philippines, which arguably if you think about gaming, especially, you know, often a completely overseen and overlooked that if you are a filipino gamer, you're like, yeah, i feel seen sure i because there's now this agent in this game that, you know, celebrates my culture and i'm proud of them and that's an example of i had for how we as game makers also have some form of responsibility to promote diversity in our culture tony morelan 55 36 yeah, i love what you said not only about how riot is taking diversity and inclusion within the company, but then you're impacting your influence outside of the company into our society that is absolutely wonderful so tell me, what do you do? outside of all of your work at riot? what do you do for fun? eric krause 55 58 what to do for fun? getting to learn anything about new cars or old cars, so i spent unhealthy amount reading and watching videos about it tony morelan 56 08 so what was your what was your first car and what is your dream car? eric krause 56 15 my first car was, was an older audi a for a vons station wagon because in europe, we love our station wagons, which i know for americans like and don't like, of course, dream car is really hard, because there's so many amazing cars and sometimes actually fantasize about it like, i'll just pick one which one would it be? and, and probably right now, my dream car is a porsche 356 a, which is a very old school, porsche, but in terms of just the body lines, you know, just amazing unfortunate i never had a chance yet to drive one i'd probably drive so amazing tony morelan 56 56 that is so funny you said that because i was waiting for my turn and mine is also the porsche 356 ever since i saw the movie top gun, beautiful porsche just yes into the sunset i've always wanted to get my hands on one funny story my wife, she had asked me when we were dating, where do you see yourself, you know, later on in life when you retire? and i said, i see myself with a porsche 356 so hopefully, when that day comes when i do decide to retire, shall let me get that dream car, eric krause 57 28 if not some amazing fortune i get one i'll call you up and then we can ride together in the sunset tony morelan 57 34 thinking for a swim but hey, let's stay away from that la traffic eric krause 57 37 that's sure yes, that's we'll definitely have to go outside of las tony morelan 57 41 hey, eric, i really appreciate you taking the time to be on the podcast it was wonderful to hear not only about yourself, but the great things that are happening over at riot games eric krause 57 49 thank you it was a pleasure yeah, definitely thank you for having me closing 57 52 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 58 08 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s03e01-eric-krause.html

tutorials mobile

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Seamlessly Integrate “Add to Wallet” for Samsung Wallet

samsung wallet enables users to easily access various digital content, such as boarding passes, tickets, and coupons, on their samsung device. users can save the content to their samsung wallet by clicking an “add to wallet” button or link. this article describes how to integrate your digital content with samsung wallet. each piece of digital content is represented by a wallet card which you must create and launch within the samsung wallet portal. after successfully launching the card, you can create an “add to wallet” link for it. prerequisites before you can create wallet cards for samsung wallet, complete the samsung wallet partner registration and onboarding process, including encryption setup. after onboarding, you receive an email with your public key and signed security certificate. keep this information in a safe place. important your company can only obtain partnership for a single samsung account. store your private key securely, as it is needed for wallet card management. your encryption settings cannot be modified without administrator approval. creating wallet cards samsung wallet supports the following wallet card types: boarding pass event ticket coupon gift card loyalty card id card create your wallet card at the samsung wallet portal. you can create as many cards as you need. the samsung wallet portal also allows you to manage your cards and monitor their performance. testing wallet cards use the “add to wallet” test tool to test the card at any time, before or after launching it: in the samsung wallet portal, enable testing mode for the card you want to test. skip this step if you have already launched the card. on your samsung device, go to the “add to wallet” test tool and sign in with your samsung account. select the card from the list and provide test data in the appropriate fields. in the “partner’s private key” field, paste your decrypted private key. this must be the same private key that was used during onboarding. noteif your private key is encrypted, you must first decode it with the ssl command. an encrypted key starts with the following text: -----begin encrypted private key----- once decoded, the key starts with the following text: -----begin private key----- 5. tap the “add to samsung wallet” button to add the card to samsung wallet on your device. for more information about testing wallet cards, see “add to wallet” test tool. launching wallet cards when you are ready to make the wallet card accessible to users, click “launch” to start the verification process. launching a card cannot be canceled. figure 1: wallet card launched the samsung wallet administrator reviews the card and approves or rejects it. if your card is rejected, check the rejection email for the reason. modify the card to address the issue and launch it again. for more information about wallet card verification, see launch wallet cards (verifying status) and launch wallet cards (rejected status). implementing “add to wallet” links after launching your wallet card, create a link that users can click to add the content to their samsung wallet. to include the card data in tokenized form, use the following url format: https://a.swallet.link/atw/v1/{card id}#clip?cdata={cdata token} where: {card id} path parameter is the unique identifier for the wallet card in the samsung wallet portal. #clip hash parameter is case-sensitive. cdata query parameter contains the encrypted card data in jwt format. for more information, see the "cdata token generation" section below. if the encrypted card data is longer than 2048 bytes, or you do not want to include the tokenized data in the url, store and reference the card data on your server. create the url in the following format: https://a.swallet.link/atw/v1/{card id}#clip?pdata={reference id} where: {card id} path parameter is the unique identifier for the wallet card in the samsung wallet portal. #clip hash parameter is case-sensitive. pdata query parameter is the unique identifier for the card data stored on your server. for more information on “add to wallet” links, see add to wallet interface. cdata token generation the card data in basic json format must be provided as a jwt (json web token). for token generation details, see security. you can also study the cdata generation sample code. to ensure your cdata token is valid, keep the following requirements in mind: pay attention to the mandatory fields in the card object. all timestamps are utc epoch time in milliseconds. card data attributes vary based on the card type. for detailed card data specifications, see wallet cards. your private key must match the key used for the security certificate signed by samsung. if you are using the correct private key, the following commands generate the same hash: $ openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in partner.key | openssl md5 $ openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in partner.crt | openssl md5 generated jwt tokens expire in 30 seconds. the “add to wallet” link must be used within this time. otherwise, you must generate a new token and new link. next steps to integrate the “add to wallet” feature as a button in your application or website, see implement the button. you can update the information on a card that has been stored in a user’s samsung wallet by communicating between your server and the samsung server. for information, see server interaction. if you have any questions or face difficulties implementing the content in this article, you can contact samsung developer support. related resources samsung wallet documentation integrate “add to samsung wallet” button into partner services code lab

M. A. Hasan Molla

https://developer.samsung.com/sdp/blog/en-us/2023/10/26/seamlessly-integrate-add-to-wallet-for-samsung-wallet

success story game, mobile, marketplace

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Snowprint Studios' CEO Alexander Ekvall Discusses Award-Winning Games and Success with Galaxy Store

jeanne hsu, senior marketing manager for developer relations at samsung, chatted with alexander ekvall, co-founder, ceo at snowprint studios about their award-winning game rivengard. jeanne hsu (jh): alexander tell us a little about yourself. alexander ekvall (ae): i’m a lifelong gamer and game maker who has been lucky enough to be able to combine my passion with my career. growing up, games had a profound impact on my life and continue to play an important role now that i have a family of my own. experiencing firsthand how games can provide meaning gave me an incredible source of inspiration and motivation. i hope to be part of developing games and communities that can be meaningful for everyday gamers. jh: what is your role at snowprint studios? ae: i am a co-founder, ceo, and game director which means i have many roles. my main responsibility is to make sure every snowprinter has the best possible environment and conditions to deliver great gaming experiences and the foundations for communities to grow, while also nurturing our company culture/ethos. jh: what was your professional journey that lead you to snowprint studios? ae: since my early teenage years i've been taking every chance i could to develop games, which also heavily influenced my choices in terms of education. during my studies for a msc in computer science, i teamed up with a group of fellow students and we started our own company creating games for palm os, nintendo ds, j2me etc. this was a great team. i have had the pleasure and honor to work with several of the team members since then, some as i started my second company. we had a great run and i got the opportunity to work with an amazing team which led to us being acquired by king. eight months after joining king we had developed and released candy crush, which was followed by another 2.5 fantastic years at king. king is a brilliant game developer, and i learned and grew a lot during my time there. i am forever grateful for being part of the journey at king, and that the stars aligned for my next opportunity. teaming up and reuniting with old colleagues, and new colleagues from their networks, we ventured into mid-core gaming to create new genre-defining experiences in turn-based-battle as snowprint studios. jh: where is snowprint studios located and where do you live? ae: snowprint has offices in stockholm and berlin. we also have people working with us in the u.s. i live in stockholm. jh: how many employees work at snowprint studios? ae: there are 38 total. there are 35 across our two locations: 20 are based in södermalm, the creative heart of stockholm, and another 15 are based in berlin. three snowprinters work remotely from the u.s. jh: so it’s still a small company. sounds like you have some really dedicated people who follow their passion as well. ae: yeah. it’s also one of the cornerstones of what we believe in. our vision is to deliver genre defining turn-based tactic experiences. in order to get there, we have small highly talented and autonomous teams where everyone has a significant and important impact on what reaches our players. this is a great way for us to always keep the player in focus during high level prioritization all the way to the smallest details. jh: how did the relationship with samsung first start? ae: we are constantly looking for the best ways to reach players and we were thrilled when we got the chance to collaborate via an introduction from a mutual friend. for me it is quite simple, galaxy store wants to provide their users with high quality content and we want our games to appear in high quality contexts such as the galaxy store. and it is a huge plus to be working with the talented folks looking after games at samsung! snowprint studios rivengard samsung award jh: congratulations on winning the 2021 best of galaxy store award - best role-playing game for rivengard from snowprint studios. what does it mean to win this award? ae: one does not make games for the awards, but it is a wonderful feeling to have your efforts acknowledged and celebrated. it was definitely a special moment for everyone who worked so hard to bring the game to market. it's also an opportunity for us to show players, who haven't gotten to experience rivengard yet, that this is the best role-playing game (rpg) experience released in 2021! which, in turn, will help bring more players in to join our great community! jh: in what ways have you promoted winning the award? ae: we proudly shared the award with our community, in discord and on social media. and of course, it’s featured on our websites for the game and on our snowprint site. jh: what is the history of the snowprint studios franchise? ae: we first opened our doors in stockholm on april 20, 2015, with a team of old friends and colleagues who had amassed great experiences from all different parts of the industry, including key positions on the largest franchises ranging from casual mobile to aaa pc/console and game engines. we united around the idea that with the unique set of combined experiences within this team, we were in a strong position to bring genre defining turn-based battle games to a massive audience on mobile. this is a genre we've loved playing and see as underserved in the market. since our founding, we've developed two games based on the above idea. the first is legend of solgard with a puzzle-tactic core mechanic that goes beyond the traditional match-3. our second title, rivengard, tailors and evolves the classic hex-based tactic core mechanics for a premium mobile gaming experience. both games feature intense tactical battles and slick ui set in fantastical worlds inhabited by extraordinary characters. our games let players progress through story driven campaigns, partake in events, battle each other and collaborate in guilds to take down massive bosses; all of which are enhanced by the communities being an integral part of the experience. we have been lucky to be able to continue to grow the team with amazing talent and open our second studio in berlin, which is where rivengard is developed. in addition to the continued development of legend of solgard and rivengard, we are now developing our third game, warhammer 40,000: tacticus. we are working hard to live up to, and go beyond, the expectations of such a beloved ip and deliver a premiere warhammer 40,000 experience. jh: how did you come up with the concept of the war of the five gods for rivengard? ae: we were looking for a good way to divide up our heroes and factions and get an understandable system for how they might relate to each other gameplay-wise. we also wanted to go beyond simple good vs. evil, especially since rivengard is a game where players would collect all kinds of heroes, from all factions, rather than picking a side. with five heroes being the standard lineup in our core game and five being a magic number mechanically (rock, paper, scissors, lizard, spock) this was a good place to start. structuring the world and the factions around five different world views or philosophies that also inform their relationship with each other felt like a perfect fit. jh: it’s amazing that rivengard launched back in jan 21, 2021, and has grown so quickly. what do you attribute to the game’s success? ae: gamers appreciate new experiences and new challenges to overcome, and they know when a development team appreciates their feedback. we have a very active community and dedicated players that bring their friends to the game, along with marvelous player ambassadors who help us improve the game with every update. jh: what made the game unique from other rpgs? ae: the unique aspect of rivengard comes from our mission of perfecting turn-based tactics for mobile, achieving real tactical gameplay through swift and snappy battles with an exceptional level of polish. this allows for challenging and rewarding battles that can be completed in minutes instead of half an hour or more, delivering an approachable experience with depth to last for years. jh: snowprint studios wants to “create rich experiences for the everyday gamer!” how has that guided the execution of your games? ae: first, it’s about knowing your audience. we make games for people like ourselves, people who play games every day as part of our lives. we love to talk about games, dissect them, discuss and argue over them, and play them with our friends. games are a passion and a part of our identity, so we want to do amazing things for people who feel the same way. next, we want to make games that fit into busy lives, but can also be enjoyed for a few hours while sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee. we all remember marathon gaming sessions with our friends and we still enjoy that, but it’s good to have something with the same energy that fits in our pockets. that’s why we aim to bring real depth and richness to the mobile platform. we can’t count on big cinematics to impress people, not on a screen that you hold in your hand. so while we pride ourselves on making gorgeously detailed art and design, the big thing we try to do is to create the opportunities to have experiences. real wow moments, where you were down to your last hit points but had the chance to pull off a clever strategy. or chances to work with your friends and execute a plan that couldn’t have succeeded without everyone’s efforts. and we always want there to be a feeling of discovery, the sense that there’s something new around every corner. game ideas, discoverability, and reach jh: how many games has snowprint studios published on galaxy store? ae: legend of solgard and rivengard are the two games available around the world on galaxy store. jh: where do you get game ideas? ae: everywhere! as with other art forms, inspiration is not in short supply. our experiences, our friends and family, our cultures, other games, and our player communities all have something to add. jh: how long does it take to go from concept to published? ae: how long is a piece of string? 😉 it really depends on how much iteration the basic concept needs, and then much depends on the early testing. sometimes it can be quite quick, a matter of months. other games take years to come to fruition. for the types of games we are focusing on, the development time until global launch tends to be at least 18 months. jh: with all the competition for games, what has been your strategy for discoverability? ae: we work very hard on performance-based marketing, but grass roots development is very important to us. if someone who loves the game brings a friend to the table, their friend is a lot more likely to love the game than someone who saw an ad. jh: what platform do you use to develop your games? ae: we develop our games using the unity game engine. jh: what has been your strategy for generating revenue? ae: first, make sure that we have an amazing game that continuously keeps providing new and valuable experiences; by focusing on this, we deliver experiences that players will want to pay for. jh: what challenges have you faced when it comes to designing, publishing or marketing? ae: we are in a highly competitive part of the market, competing with companies sitting on huge marketing budgets where breaking through requires much more than a great game. but it’s not a bad thing that we need to be as creative in our marketing as in our game development! we need to leverage the design, publishing and marketing all together. in the early days we were very focused on the design of the game and worked with partners for some of the areas of publishing and marketing. we have since then transitioned into an independent studio working on all three of these areas in unison and we are now getting closer to having the stars aligned. a related challenge is to find the best way to operate our games in regions that are outside of our area of expertise. jh: how do you source your music? ae: everything in rivengard and legend of solgard has been made in-house. but we also work together with partners for some of the sound effects and might look to them for music too. jh: why is it important to offer your game on galaxy store? ae: we want to go wherever players are, and we’ve seen more and more samsung players joining our communities. we’re delighted to have them. feedback and advice jh: you mentioned you’re in touch with the players. how do they give you feedback? is there a regular channel? ae: we have the usual forums and facebook groups for the social aspects of it. but we also have a very active group on more direct chats such as discord. we also invite our more engaged players into our ambassador program; we stay in close touch with the players, have them play test builds and test out new features to obtain input before we go live to the larger population. jh: what advice would you give developers looking to bring their games to galaxy store? ae: that's a good question. we want our games to be where players are. we want to be associated with high quality standards. and we want as many opportunities as possible to reach players to give them great experiences. the samsung store is a good fit for all of those things. and it's not that big of an extra effort to get on galaxy store. all our interactions with the team at galaxy store have been great as well. we are there and we think you should be there too. jh: what is in the future for snowprint studios? ae: we’ll continue to operate and develop innovative, interesting, deep turn-based tactics for as long as people want to play them. and continue to develop or games in a direction where the players are a more integral part of the experiences, there is a lot of interesting opportunities here! jh: what are some of the ways you promote rivengard? ae: here are our websites and channels: website: https://snowprintstudios.com/ website: https://snowprintstudios.com/rivengard/ facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rivengard.game/ discord: https://discord.gg/tnneu3mn2x youtube & videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0fenioojmo company culture and fun jh: what is snowprint studios doing related to diversity and inclusion? ae: we find a lot of value in having a diverse team to get as many different kinds of inputs and angles that influence the gaming experience. we are also very focused on kind of getting the best functional teams together. so in our hiring, we work on being as inclusive and open as possible when we create the job listings, our postings, and design our ads. jh: how do you promote fun with your teams? ae: the main thing is we have our snow day where we get together and combine work and fun. it's basically like our conference. we look at the big picture and ask where are we heading? are we going in the right direction? we take a look at our ethos, we discuss our ethos, and we refine it. and we also kind of just have fun together, do a bunch of different activities that we plan out each year. so it's new activities for each snow day, including escape rooms, vr, or gaming competitions. jh: escape rooms? that sounds really fun. is it virtual? ae: no, we’ve done real escape rooms. and also the kind where there was a big hall where you could go on a vr adventure. although, this was before the pandemic. jh: sounds like you’re keeping the team together. ae: yes, we try. it’s definitely a challenge during covid. before covid, we used to do spontaneous gaming get-togethers at the office. “who wants to stick around for this gaming session or board game?” that’s hard to replicate during covid. jh: what do you do for fun outside of work? ae: besides playing games? 😀 i love seeking out new types of experiences that i can grow from. in more recent years that has included jet skiing (wave runner) and fpv [first person view] drones. finding opportunities to enjoy new experiences with family and friends is the best combination. jh: thank you for your time alexander. congratulations again to your team! ae: you’re welcome and thank you! be sure to also follow us on @samsung_dev to keep up-to-date on the latest developer news, and keep an eye on our blogs for other helpful resources. you can also sign up for the samsung developer program to take advantage of exclusive benefits and access helpful developer resources.

Jeanne Hsu

https://developer.samsung.com/sdp/blog/en-us/2022/04/19/snowprint-studios-ceo-alexander-ekvall-discusses-award-winning-games-and-success-with-galaxy-store

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Episode 5, Aurelien Lavaud

season 1, episode 5 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guests aurelien lavaud global associate director of business development, gameloft / asphalt 9 linkedin david bitton, senior global account manager, samsung linkedin in this episode of pow, special guest host david bitton, senior global account manager at samsung, interviews aurelien lavaud, global associate director of business development at gameloft david and aurelien not only talk about the amazing success of the asphalt franchise racing game, but also the partnership between samsung, gameloft and the vivendi group, the global entertainment and media company that owns gameloft listen download this episode topics covered gameloft history samsung partnership the vivendi group asphalt 9 licensing best of galaxy store awards 2019 more about gameloft & asphalt 9 gameloft is a french video game publisher based in paris the company operates 19 development studios worldwide, and publishes games with a special focus on the mobile games market try asphalt 9 for a spin on your samsung device! go to galaxy store to download, drive your favorite hyper-car and become a racing legend today! helpful links gameloft com asphaltlegends com facebook content creators transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcast of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech new trends and give insight into all the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, we're doing something a little different our interview is with gameloft, the french gaming company that won the 2019 best of galaxy store award for best racing game asphalt 9 david bitton, senior global account manager at samsung sat in as a guest host to chat with aurelien lavaud, global associate director of business development at gameloft david and aurelien not only talk about the amazing success of the asphalt franchise, but also the partnership between samsung, gameloft and the vendee group, the global entertainment and media company that owns gameloft and what else is unique about this interview, both david and aurelien are originally from france, but david currently lives in korea and aurelien lives in vietnam and the music that you're going to hear in this podcast? well that's all the official music from the soundtrack from asphalt 9 enjoy david bitton 01 12 hello, welcome to this session so i'm david bitton, senior business development manager at samsung and based in korea today i'm very excited to have a volunteer from gameloft, the game company behind the asphalt franchise so olivia, welcome hello, david, aurelien lavaud 01 31 how are you? david bitton 01 32 good thank you let me start by asking a basic question who is okay yeah aurelien lavaud 01 38 level i'm already a level global by director of business development gambler so my daily routine consists in creating and deploying public partnerships with manufacturers all around the world and what i love in this in this job is such gives me the chance to be at the front line of innovation, discovering new technological trends that i can then use to provide insight to a developer on teams and improve, keep improving your games so i also used to be on vr on the sides two years ago, you aflac i took part in the development of some iconic titles, such as the revamped versions of snake or tea trees so i try to always have this double heart with the understanding of technical feasibility within the business model, the business directions we want to implement on a more personal level, i'm fortunate to be based in vietnam, in southeast asia, very beautiful new age, and i will i highly recommend to visit if you're into hiking, or kayaking me to an amazing wildlife so that's what i'm trying to do enjoy as much as i can on my feet hi david bitton 02 48 yeah, that sounds exciting, especially because i'm based in korea so that's not that that's far so yeah, that could be a great a great opportunity can you talk a little bit more about the history of gameloft? aurelien lavaud 03 04 certainly so gamma was created in 2000, with a patient for games and the desire to bring them to even more pay on the war by bringing the wonders of games to mobile devices, we have creating a one new market that became 20 years later, the biggest market in gaming so what we did over the years was shipping companies to be able to deliver this vision and today we are 4600 employees, over 17 developers to throw the war and where people are working hard to bring new games to a wide range of devices with ad hoc or patient david bitton 03 46 that that's great you said that you have 17 development studios around the world so that's quite big, more than 4000 employees and you also have a very large game portfolio so, again last is it like the more games, the better? aurelien lavaud 04 04 well, i talk all we want everyone to play and we believe there's a different game for everyone so no matter the device, language, the region or the general, we try to make it available so having a very powerful you come with logic and we provide for brain wide range of different experiences for a wide range of people preferences david bitton 04 30 okay just to dive a little bit more into your, into this samsung partnership out of curiosity, how long have you been working with samsung as a partner? and how did that start? because i guess, from what i know, that's, that's quite a long-time partnership here that we are talking about aurelien lavaud 04 51 yes, we have been working with them for more than 15 years wow so we started on the feature phones at the time java devices were king dennis pink starting to pick up on truth 2010 with project on the first something series, and we had the asphalt wcag series that we signed that was memorable, made a lot of noise and later on in 2019, we are refreshed and we started our collaboration with another big name game of catalog with yes one nine on the galaxy app store that was off a long list of games coming david bitton 05 34 as we as we know game lost is also a part of the of the vivendi group which is a global entertainment and media company so how do you see opportunities and synergies not only internally within your different business units and sister companies but also externally with your partnership with samsung aurelien lavaud 05 59 we have already been developing great synergies, especially with kind of priests we developed by putting on a run and we walked into with universal music on the fallout by integrating in as well i, i see on some of the older partnerships like disney, we were working with them before prior to the acquisition david bitton 06 20 and speaking of these of these games, you mentioned that disney for example what are the games currently included in the in the partnership does the first question and second question for you would be what were the criteria to include them in the in the partnership? aurelien lavaud 06 39 usually we started with asphalt 9 games it was perfect timing because we are now celebrating the 15th birthday of our series happy birthday thank you so i will introduce later you can reach asphalt 9 facebook page or we also have a dedicated website as www asphalt9 com where you can discover everything about just full series along these 15 years and you can enjoy some, some gift that can take part to some to some get involved into the hype game and david bitton 07 23 i will certainly do that yeah, aurelien lavaud 07 24 thank you for furthering the discussion after asphalt nine we started working on dragon manual agents together at disney magic kingdom and legally it wasn't necessary great now we are also working on some stuff too and we are planning to release in next month on the samsung galaxy app store david bitton 07 46 great, great so more and more games are coming but if we if we want to get a little bit more specifics on the asphalt 9 because there was a second of the aurelien lavaud 07 58 game here asphalt 9 offers like a fully licensed cars so initially how much time did it take for us for asphalt nine to team to convince the most prestigious brands to join the game to create enough momentum to stop the engine? no pun intended so yeah, we've been working with car manufacturer for more than 15 years now so the process was asphalt nine was actually quite smooth, because we had already a lot of a lot of partners on board what happened is that we present into game to twitch partner and we are all very excited to be part of the adventure so we got already all most of most of all, car manufacturers david bitton 08 48 some early discussion to launching a model from a new car manufacturer earlier, how long does it usually take to incorporate this discard into the into the game aurelien lavaud 09 00 while dvd it will already depend licensor for the partners we already work with, it's pretty fast, it's a human but on the partner we want the new partners that we want to integrate into games to work with us we need to pitch the game first and then create some legal contracts and we are more on we own a few months up to one year david bitton 09 29 and now that asphault nine is celebrating its 15th birthday so that's kind of nice teenager and is getting also more popular do car manufacturers also promote a sold night in their own channels? aurelien lavaud 09 45 yeah, i put is a very interesting that they do we recently launched into the coming season and license or use these two promos, every kid on their social network oh great great on top of that, with longtime relationship with bree to them we are often walking in close partnership to have some unique experience to our users so as an example, we collaborated recently with lamborghini so top players could be invited in lamborghini hq in italy david bitton 10 20 i think there was a mistake here because i didn't get invited so i would love to maybe to play a little bit more on the on assaulter so, aurelien lavaud 10 31 yes, train a train half an hour and you may be the next one david bitton 10 35 okay, okay so i will play and repeat just for a forum actually, the samsung ran many asphault nine tournaments included, including in the netherlands, korea, the us at our annual developer conference in south africa as well when usually trying to promote the launch of new devices like galaxy note 10, for example, or when running some events like galaxy studio around the world so thanks to them to the customization of this publicly available ap can gain we could we could offer a unique experience to our users so i guess that the different teams involved the there must have had some extra hours of developing testing and as we said, playing as well right in the tribe we have been putting a lot of work on this live demo units, give you some numbers we are looking at around 300 hours of testing wow so that was heavy, but i needed to make sure all the products were top notch yeah and our latest developer conference in the in the us, you went on stage to receive a best of a world in the in the racing category for us asphalt 9 so what was your feeling regarding this, this event aurelien lavaud 12 16 that we're feeling was amazing i mean from via reception or via word to the game booth that was welcoming a huge crowd of people eager to play asphault nine on the lattice samsung galaxy fold it was three more i believe in david bitton 12 33 and in speaking of galaxy fold, actually, you also on book two to create a customized version of the game for galaxy fold that that would support app continuity so from your side, partner perspective, what were the lessons learned there during this, this approach and the development? aurelien lavaud 12 57 i think this project was particular interesting because quilted was new for the team they had never been walking on, on this feature so what they were discovering, and they were eating, they were eating some wood blocks so at some points, they weren't progressing anymore and that's where they started, we started to connect or different developers seem together with your ui on the team at samsung and we were able to overcome to overcome the difficulties that both teams were working together to deliver our very nice products and to make sure that we can keep this continuity and move from one screen to another two tablets off when we opened it to the device, without any interruption without any change so it was quite collaboration and we learned a lot from this david bitton 13 52 let's switch gears here and admit and let's talk about the future if i if i may so 90s is right now in full, full speed again, happy birthday assault without revealing any trade secrets, i was wondering what would trigger the release of assault then? would that be like a new game engine on which you're working on or some kind of revolutionary user experience? could you could you share a little bit more about that? aurelien lavaud 14 26 should they so i will probably disappoint everybody but at the moment we are not planning to release something yet there's a reason behind is that there are a lot of work to do on asphault nine so as for nine i've never been so successful there are plenty of new features and contents we are planning to offer on asphault nine so objective is really to prove us on nine first, to focus on innovation to make sure we can integrate new features new contents, new cars, new tracks to deliver perfect and expanse of course will promote ensuring new technologies as well and there will be integrated into us online but no vision at the moment for us have felt any relief because we still have so much work to do and david bitton 15 14 understood so, as you as you mentioned, you said that you regularly add content you features so, would you have any exciting location coming up soon for as for nine aurelien lavaud 15 28 bring a new location is always a very important part of the game because it helps us to rediscover the game unfortunately, i will not be able to deliver any information in wales next tracks will be what i can do is to invite user to general on a facebook page where we are trying to keep the hype to make the user guess what is the next track so you can take parts to the discussion, you can get involved on the facebook page you will get more insights step by step on the new tracks we are planning to release okay? okay the other thing i can tell is that we also have this this content creator opportunity so you can go on www asphaultnine com/creators and he, you can take part into the content creation show interested so you can get more insight on where the game is heading you can get more involved into the game okay, okay, a way to keep the hype going david bitton 16 30 your team i mean, the asphalt 19 aurelien lavaud 16 34 as a unique expertise in racing, modeling cause even experiencing crashes, for example so, actually, i have two questions here is their first any plan to leverage this expertise for a new racing game from the same team does the first question and second question more generally, how much of transferable skills feels a dedicated studio team can have when it comes to creating games indeed, we have some studios that are specialized in different games but overall, there's a lot of shared knowledge and synergies between the different teams so, our promise to you is the same for you or at company level we work on different types of titles, different types of channels and different for different audiences but based on the resources leads based on the experience of the team, we will be able to be flexible and to bring people to support us our team to allocate resources differently on the project that we need needs to last so we always try to develop or games or team and grow people to make sure they can, they can move to a different type of projects to a difference a different type of develop different type of skills and they can yeah david bitton 18 01 okay, okay great, great going back to this partnership with samsung, any exciting plan you would like to develop in the, in the future with a samsung any, any specific any specific ideas that you that you would have to grow to grow the business aurelien lavaud 18 18 actually we are very open and now since we started with the partnership we were really impressed with all the innovations you guys we are bringing so we could be looking at other new technologies from artificial intelligence to augmented reality virtual reality cloud gaming we are going to explore it a bit everything and we just probably need the time to see what kind of walk and how we can do this together david bitton 18 54 exciting just between you and me if you will to own one of these hyper cars that that are available in asphalt nine if you if you don't have the already, which one? would it be? would you have any preference for a specific hyper car? and second question, where would you drive this car? aurelien lavaud 19 17 unfortunately, i do not have any of these cats i wish i did i wish i do but no, i have a sweet spot for the cats sharon i would i think it would be quite nice to drive it on the italian coast so we could have a clever, nice, nice view on the mediterranean sea and enjoy the ride david bitton 19 44 okay, this this sounds nice yeah just to just to finish here with a last question we do have any closing comments for developers out there? aurelien lavaud 19 57 yes as a matter of fact i have so we were very happy with sort of the experience we do guys is i think it's a very good experience to walk with samsung in the way that you've always been super supportive so i was about studying when we were developing dual screen, the team was the wizard team was hitting some roadblocks and, and in both for the teams working together, to fix everything, and to bring things forward we were also quite impressed with all those new features and new technologies you are developing on your recent models and for us, give us a way to improve the game experience for the user to provide to users new features, and to deliver a more memorable game experience david bitton 20 48 okay, yeah so, two things that are here for to do thank you first happy birthday again to the asphalt franchise and second, thanks thank you for your time again i hope we could we could shed some light on our partnership between samsung and again last and also get developers excited so earlier thank you thank you again for your time aurelien lavaud 21 16 thank you very much for the invitation on this podcast was very, very interesting and i really hope we can develop new technologies and develop organs further on samsung devices outro 21 30 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out www developersamsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e05-aurelien-lavaud.html

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Episode 10, Chris Shomo

season 1, episode 10 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest chris shomo infinity watchfaces in this episode of pow, i interview chris shomo from infinity watchfaces chris was one of the first designers to start selling watch faces on galaxy store and has become a very successful app designer along the way he has inspired many other designers to start creating for samsung with his willingness to share his knowledge and expertise listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy themes studio galaxy store galaxy store badges social promotion jibber jab reviews jibber jab reviews live chat iot gadgets samsung galaxy watch facebook group tap reveal galaxy watch3 asset creator lifestyle photos chris shomo sdc17 video presentation transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 0 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcast of wisdom from the samsung developer program where we talk about the latest tech, trends and give insight into all of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, i interview chris shomo from infinity watch faces chris was one of the first designers to start selling watch faces on the galaxy store and has become one of the most successful along the way he's inspired many other designers to start creating for samsung with his willingness to share his knowledge and expertise in fact, it was a video i saw of chris who inspired me to start designing watch faces, which eventually led me to my gig at samsung so it is an absolute honor to bring him on to the podcast and let me warn you chris, and i'd love to talk and sometimes we go off on a few tangents, talking about how his house was not only featured in an episode of ghost hunters, but was also used in a big time hollywood movie and of course we talk a lot about designing and marketing apps for samsung enjoy tony morelan 0 58 i am super excited to have on the podcast today chris shomo from infinity watch faces so let me first actually start by asking who is chris shomo? chris shomo 1 05 hey, tony, thank you so much for having me on the show who is chris sharma i'm, i'm a lot of things i am a designer, which you know, initially, you know, when someone is a designer, they can be quirky, they can be geeky, sometimes they can be introverted sometimes or they can be outgoing it depends on my mood and the time of day, i can be a little bit of everything so, but you know, i can be the shy person in the room, but you get me talking about something that i'm interested in, and then sometimes you can't get me to shut up so i can absolutely relate to that, that you've pretty much have described my personality definitely, you know, being a fellow designer, and that's why i'm really excited about this podcast is that we can kind of geek out a bit as we're talking design cool so how did you first get your start in graphic design? oh, geez well, i guess it goes all the way back to when i was a little kid my mom always had me doing artistic projects for school actually, i would always find a way to make some sort of artistic project if i could for homework, i would always go to the art route it was a lot more fun and then in high school, i did a project it was a pennant drawing of the shakespeare globe theater and i did it for an english class and i decided to take an art class as an elective and mrs martin, my art teacher in high school, she asked for some examples of my previous work and out of my bookbag, i took out a folded piece of paper and then i just like unfolded it to this, this gigantic poster size of the shakespeare globe theater it was that that artistic drawing i did, and then she said, okay, lesson number one, do not fold up your artwork so, that's how i kind of got started and that drawing was pretty awesome and she kind of excelled me through she put me into the higher level art classes real quick they kind of skipped me a couple classes and i want a lot of awards against other students and some regional awards in the area and then afterwards, i decided to go to art school and my brother discovered the savannah college of art and design down savannah, georgia and yes, so yeah, i attended there wow so for a good while to almost like a van wilder experience but multiple degrees tony morelan 3 33 wonderful again, i could relate to that i definitely took the long route through college so straight out of college, then did you work for a large company? did you start your own your own gig? what did you what was your first step coming out of college? chris shomo 3 46 okay, well, i graduated with my undergrad in computer art with a focus on 3d animation and that was in 2005 and right after the i interviewed for some companies, and i just really did not want to be stuck in a cubicle, just you know, for the jobs that i was offered so i ended up taking a job for a contractor and helping build a house from ground up oh, wow and after that, i decided i was interested in architecture and i put together a portfolio and scad gave me a portfolio scholarship to come back and they paid for the masters and i got my masters in architecture tony morelan 4 21 wow i did not know that chris shomo 4 23 yeah so and of many secrets, i guess, some hidden talents there but i did graduate after the economy crashed, and it was really hard to find a job in architecture so i started a website design company and from there, i just kind of, you know, word of mouth i just kept on gaining clients until eventually i had clients all across the east coast so you went to school in savannah, georgia are you currently in savannah? is that where your offices based out of? yes, savannah is where my heart is i love the city and i'm actually president of the neighborhood association for the neighborhood that i'm in, and it's one of the largest neighborhoods in savannah okay and southern living magazine actually ranked the number one neighborhood to live in in the south as well right before all the craziness this year, we got that nation sure so it is quite interesting because it there's so many local businesses and residential neighborhoods in this neighborhood so just dealing with everything from alcohol licenses and giving our blessing and, you know, zoning issues and, you know, just figuring out what's going on with crosswalks and trash cans and all that kind of stuff you know, it's interesting tony morelan 5 40 so i actually heard a very interesting note about not just the neighborhood but the house that you live in yes, you once told me that it is actually haunted chris shomo 5 50 it is haunted and it's documented on a ghost hunters’ episode i believe it's 2010 home is where the heart is okay yeah, it's all about the current a family that was living there and their experiences with a ghost they say they've seen this ghost this little girl apparently, her name is tony clark and she's been appearing i guess for the past hour well, the previous owner salt or 200 times that's what they said 200 or more times, and ghost hunters did believe that there were dual entities in the house as well think okay, well, monique clark she is the daughter of the guy who built the house back in 1896 and he owned a lumber mill and he inherited this lumber mill from his father when he was 26 years old and he built a house known he was one of his daughters and apparently, she was one of the first women to receive a pacemaker for her heart and that led to her dying somehow i don't know what happened to it but she died when she was in her 50s but supposedly she's coming back is like a 12 year old girl i've never seen i've had some strange things happen in the house door slamming things disappearing from one place appearing in another place not my imagination other people have experienced things too but how she was identified is that the lady across the street had apparently, i recognize the description of the nightgown that she appeared in because she had made that night gown for her when she was young so getting a little cold chills thinking about it right now but it is interesting, but yeah, i don't feel scared in the house i think the house accepts me i have never had to smudge it or whatever you call it or you know, try to clear spirits out of there but it's an interesting story and it's always fun when somebody else experiences something tony morelan 7 46 oh, that is absolutely wild to hear you know, and we'll circle back to the whole aspect of design in this podcast i will note before i'm going to jump ahead just a little bit your designs have a little bit of a quirkiness to it and sometimes i'm seeing, you know, ghosts and aliens and the crazy thing so i think that may be where you're getting some of your inspiration chris shomo 8 08 yeah well, i mean, you live in a dynamic city, it's actually one of the most haunted cities in america sure you know, and it's one of the most wild cities in america too i mean, you have this, this local field, but then, at the same time, you know, it's one of the few places in america where you have an open cup, and, you know, take a drink from one bar to another downtown so it leads to a little bit of craziness but i myself pride myself in being a little crazy, you know, you have to be in this crazy world and i love surprising people with designs to light like one second yeah, you'll have a butterfly that looks realistic landing on your, on your watch and then the next moment, you know, you have some zombies that are appearing with your step, go biohazard z tony morelan 8 57 that's a great one yeah, definitely so we were fortunate actually to come out and visit you at savannah college of art and design where we came in hosted a session with your students, teaching them all about theme designing for phones and watch faces and that connection actually came through you so that was my opportunity to come out to savannah and get to meet you in person what a beautiful city i mean, it really in the campus itself to is pretty unique because from what i understand savannah college of art and design, they're like the number one occupancy of buildings in downtown is that correct? i mean, as far as the campuses is put together, chris shomo 9 32 yeah, it seems like it's every other building and it's really amazing what they've done for savannah they encouraged a lot of businesses to move in as well to cater to the students and they really played a huge role in where savannah is today you know, we get millions and millions of visitors every single year and schools to thank for a lot of that, you know, just the restoration projects and encouraging restoration and then of course, we have a great hit preservation society alone just in savannah being the oldest plant city in america, and in a genius plan to just how it integrates with all the giant oak trees that are in all the squares and people are really jealous of those, those oak trees and, you know, as a person living there, i always try to make sure that i go out and i do what the visitors do, just to remind myself, you know, what a beautiful city it is and then, you know, just going to school in those historic buildings as well it just it helps with the creativity and yeah, the location definitely helps with the whole artistic side of things tony morelan 10 39 yes, and for those who don't know, savannah is actually the city where they filmed the scene of forrest gump on the bench yep, that iconic moment in forrest gump where he's sitting on that bench that was in savannah at one of the squares i actually walked by that to take a look at that for myself just an amazing city chris shomo 11 00 and it's actually known for a lot of movies as well like the lady in the tramp that's on disney plus that was filmed they actually looked at my house to potentially film it there but they said that the lot was too big so they actually filmed it a few blocks down and yeah, and then also, my house is where the movie legend of bagger vance was filmed there's a scene where it's where the little kid lives the caddy and there's a whole scene at the dinner table where they're, they're talking and stuff that's my dining room oh, wow it was one of the houses the few houses around there that had a dining room with a view to the kitchen as well and they needed that for the scene so robert redford picked out the wallpaper it's kind of cool tony morelan 11 47 absolutely crazy yeah oh, wow i knew this podcast would be fun, but i have no idea so let's circle back around and let's talk a little bit about design okay, tell me how you first heard about the sample galaxy watch chris shomo 12 00 okay, well, i'm a tech geek i love any type of mobile tech, especially before the watches came out on i was like a cell phone fanatic like, you know, first we wanted them to get small and now they're getting bigger yes now we need the biggest phone ever, which i absolutely love but i was eyeing smartwatches for a while and finally i was like, okay, i'm getting one at the time i'm like, i couldn't really afford it but you know, i don't care i'm getting one so i went down to the best buy and i got the first gear s to sport i just loved it it was great but there was one thing that bothered me i needed more watch faces i was bored with the watch faces that were available and went on the it was galaxy apps before but now the galaxy store and you know, i even paid like i think it was like five or $10 for a watch face it looked like the coolest one out there then like, alright, how do i make my own? so that's when i just googled and i found it was the galaxy watch designer well, at the time, it was the gear watch designer 1 0 wow and, like, right when it first came out, i mean, i think i might have actually caught it within days of it coming out and i downloaded it, and i just started playing around with it and i never even planned on releasing any of them for anybody else i just, you know, wanted to make some for me and then i'm like, alright, look, i can, i can load some and see if i can make a few dollars let's do it so i think i made like $17 off of two watch faces the first day and then i'm just thinking to myself, like, you know, what if i have like 300 watch faces on there, you know, how much how much can i make her? so i mean, sure enough now gosh, i have about 394 watch faces and themes published wow, that's amazing and how long would you say this has been? oh gosh i started in i think it was february, early february of 2016 okay, so when i started, and you can actually kind of look back at some of my very early designs, and see how the design has improved over time sure the very first one that i did, i just called it gear spin and i didn't really know much about the designer, the software and everything i was just getting into, it didn't really think that i could even put a graphic on, you know, a watch hand and use it other than a watch hand at the time so i even animated a gear using adobe flash exported the frame animations out and threw it in there just to get a gear spinning sure now, i'll just put it on a second hand but i'm thinking coming from a designing standpoint, not a watch standpoint and, and that's something that you that you really have to start doing it start thinking, you know, i'm also a watchmaker in a way exactly, you know, so you got to start thinking, that language and that starts you know, meshing with the creative ideas and then you start, you know, you got to focus on functionality at the same time that you're trying to focus on dynamics and what it looks like, that sort of thing so tony morelan 15 11 that's true and you know, i do a lot of teaching to students just learning how to watch design and the challenges are that they've got this tool that can allow them to just do amazing graphics and amazing animations and then they forget that really, this is a time piece where people need to quickly tell what time it is so even though you can have a lot of fun with your graphics in your animation, you still need to make it where you know on quick notice, you can actually tell what time it is i mean, that's the whole the function of the watch and that's what i love with your designs as well i mean, you've got some amazing, fun, quirky, crazy designs i mean, everything from dogs and butterflies to spooky, eyeballs and reapers so let's talk a little bit about your approach to design and some of the tools you're using you had mentioned adobe flash so we're going back in the day oh gosh, yeah chris shomo 16 03 well, i don't use that anymore but i used to use that all the time tony morelan 16 07 so tell me kind of that your workflow, you know, when you know, from concept, your tools, are you sketching on pencil and paper when you have an idea, or do you just dive right into a software program? chris shomo 16 18 well, i guess this is where professors are going to want to smack me and i should be sketching more than that you know, scat always says, you start with the basics, and you start sketching, and i need to carry around a sketchbook but no, i kind of jump into the software first but in a way, i kind of sketch digitally i'll start with a program like adobe illustrator, just to get the basic shapes done and i'll move them into photoshop, of course, to get the nice effects to get the textures, some of the shadows or to create the shadow layers that you'll export separately later you know, those are our two the main tools of getting i guess, the framework of the of the watch, but of course, i like to do animations, so using a lot of after effects and premiere, and sometimes when i have to maya and all that kind of stuff, and then you know, getting it out to the, the frames, and also being very cautious about file size as well you know, we are dealing essentially with an app, even though it's very focused around design, which i'm very thankful thank you samsung for giving me awesome design software, where i don't have to code everything but, but you do have to remember that, you know, people will get frustrated if you have a, you know, a 50 megabyte watch face, which i mean, i could easily make one that large but it's all about understanding the compression and understanding your tools to make sure that when you deliver that watch face, it's fine, it's dynamic, it has all the effects but it doesn't take forever to install or it doesn't, you know, someone doesn't have an issue with it so understanding the technical side but really understand or design software tony morelan 18 02 that helps, you know, and you had mentioned a little trick that i may have actually learned from you in that where you had said that you know, your first animation was done using flash and bringing those in as animated gifs but you then said, hey, i could have just made this a watch hand and that's one of those tricks that when you realize that watch hands don't actually have to be watch hands it's the watch and feature is basically just a rotating graphic that you can then set its direction that it rotates, you can set the you know, the time that it rotates so again, another tip that came from chris that helped me in my, in my success as a watch face designer and i'm actually going to take this moment to thank you again, because it was your you had mentioned, you started in 2016 i think it was at the developer conference in 2017 that samsung invited you out to actually speak at the event was that correct? yes, that's right so tell me a little bit about that that experience, because it was after that conference, they posted the video online and that's how i first learned about designing for samsung it was finding this video of chris shomo from infinity watch faces speaking at the conference, that then got me excited so tell me a little about that chris shomo 19 20 uh, that moment, the whole experience was awesome at first late, like when you get an email saying, hey, would you like to come to the samsung developers conference? i'm like, what, at first, i'm just kind of like, samsung sees me this is cool you know how to play i'm getting so excited the experience was great meeting the team was wonderful and just, you know, the team itself were, you know, the designers of the software, the galaxy watch designer, and all that they were so embracing of everybody that came it was such a wonderful experience and then also talking with them and understanding, you know, their process and what goes into creating the software that was amazing too but i guess one of the, the most awesome and rewarding parts of this is all the designers led you, to me that have come to me, it's just like, just been like, thank you for giving that presentation because you guys showed me that, you know, anybody can do this and, and, you know, and then if you have some fun and, you know, wonderful designs that people like then then you can really succeed at it as well and i just i love that yeah, that i could influence someone to start a watch face design career there's another one in particular, that is with usa design he started a little bit later he was doing some games for the watch and he was there at the presentation as well and now he's like one of the top sellers it's amazing he jumped into it he founded as a design formula that works really great with the active two, especially when that came out without the bezel at the time, and is doing phenomenal and i just absolutely love to see that and the fact that i might have played a part in pushing him in that direction is just, it's rewarding it's humbling it's, it's cool tony morelan 21 28 yeah, no, that's, that's great it was you know, when i watched that video of your presentation, and you had mentioned, the first thing was that you can create these watch faces without coding you know, i've done a little bit of coding, but my experience is a lot like yours i mean, i had my own freelance design company i did a lot of website designing but when i learned that you could create these watch faces, really without doing any coding so it's just such an extension of photoshop or illustrator in using like after effects with the timeline you can have so much fun doing it you had mentioned earlier little secret again, just like the watch hands rotating how you could actually have buttons that you could tap and reveal things by using a transparent png that didn't have any pixels in it, you use that as sort of like a cover button well, when i learned about that, i then dove into this whole idea of being able to tap certain areas of the watch and have it reveal new things like, you know, if you wanted to show your step counter, you could tap an icon and it would then show the numbers so you could customize the look of the watch face, cleaning it up by not having all the graphics show, but tapping to reveal whatever sort of data you wanted to see your heart rate beats per minute, i mean, all sorts of different elements and it was from you the that i learned about that i then have totally expanded on that creating videos on tap reveal, that are shown on youtube and doing a whole thing around that and i've seen that a lot of people really enjoy, you know, learning about that and that again, came from you in that presentation so thank you a big thank you from the crowd of designers that really appreciate what you've what you've inspired chris shomo 23 09 thanks yeah, i mean, it's fun and that all kind of spawned from figuring out a solution to putting all this information on a watch face, but not making it look too busy and so kind of hiding it and revealing it there, it kind of making use with the tools that are given to you, and how can you make it work to simulate something when you when you don't have all the code underneath it so tony morelan 23 35 that's great so we've talked a lot about watch faces i know you also are doing theme designing so what was that progression? you first were designing for watches and then learn that you could actually do something very similar with theme studio and creating themes for our phone devices chris shomo 23 52 yeah, no, the whole idea is matching your watch face to your theme and having total continuity between the two and for example, the shock theme that one's actually a free one just called shock, you can look it up that's the most downloaded theme that i have and it has a matching much face called shock as well so you just be shocking everybody with the shock but, but yeah, in those i also like to i like to make fun and exciting something that you wouldn't expect from dancing frogs to lightning bolts to oh gosh, and i got so many more that are just about to come out i'm not going to ruin the surprise, but y'all are gonna love them tony morelan 24 34 wonderful i'm looking at your website and the one that jumps out to me is martian bash i know it's a great dancing alien you know, how is that is there been a lot of success behind some of these quirky dancing cuz i've seen like santas dancing and you've got a lot of fun ones chris shomo 24 48 well, yeah, because i want to reward people for taking some steps a lot of these characters that are on there, they change what they're doing based upon step gold percentage so if you want the aliens dance you're going to have to meet your step goal so in the morning, he might, you know, he's standing there, he's waving at you and then as you proceed during the day, he's running one direction and towards you that another direction and then finally, yeah, he's dancing whoo, you just read your step goal one of the points of these watches is for health and to encourage people to, you know, get out of the chair and you know, move around, and so why not make something that's fun and exciting and encourages that at the same time? that's great so even the one called bolt that has lightning bolts that go across it starts as like a tiny little bolt and as you proceed through the day with your step, go, more electricity comes out and i'm getting ready to release another one with a fun little loving alien that does a lot of other stuff to your step goal as well so that should be fun tony morelan 25 45 super excited about that tell me watch face designing and theme designing is this your full-time gig or do you actually still go back and do some of your website designing or anything beyond design? chris shomo 25 55 oh, this is actually full part time gig chris shomo 26 00 between that and website design and i'm also the cto and creative director of the picker joe's brand you probably heard of antique pickers, vintage pickers, they go around and find really cool stuff and bring it to people yes so yeah, there's a store in savannah, georgia called picker joe's antique mall and it's 10,000 square feet 25,000 items that change daily, about 65 antique pickers that go out and find all this stuff we like to say that it's an experience like no other because it really is we have people that come in from different parts of the world, from across the country, and they go, wow, this is the best antique mall experience that i've ever had and we've also been on oh gosh, i don't know how many interviews so far with the same production company that does american pickers and so they are still considering us possibly for that show oh, wow but, but i designed the branding and do all the advertising and we do crazy videos usually filmed with the latest samsung phone as well and if you go to our instagram if you look at our youtube and stuff, you'll see some of the, the wild and insane advertisements that we do all the time and that's one of the things that really sets it apart from other stores i mean, if you ever heard of an antique store that you know for halloween has monsters invading us and appearing everywhere and like all sorts of things, no, probably not but i encourage everybody to check it out and if you're in savannah, you've got to experience it you really did tony morelan 27 31 definitely in i can see in your designs you definitely have a lot of fun humor happening i'm looking at the watch face for joe, joe's, your character of the dog that seems like his tongue is actually bigger, bigger and then his head and wagging more than his tail yep, chris shomo 27 53 yep and i actually have a dog named joe and that's actually what picker joe's is named after do oh, that's great figure so he's a jack russell and he actually looks very similar to joe and he likes all the time he's always happy and always mischievous as well, too so, again, he'll react to your step go, he'll, he'll do some fun stuff at 50% as well so definitely check that out tony morelan 28 18 so, are you doing all this design work yourself? or do you have a team of designers that work with you in producing watch faces and themes? chris shomo 28 25 most of this stuff is just me but i do have a another a friend and fellow colleague that graduated with me, jonathan maillard he's over in denver right now so i do pull him in on tons of different projects we're working on some right now some interesting apps and hopefully in the very near future, some game designs as well oh, that's great that's great yeah, games are a big push for samsung so super excited to hear that you're going to bring your brand over to that side and let's produce some amazing games it's going to be fine do you work out of your house? do you actually have an office space? okay, i have multiple locations that i can work out of i definitely have the house set up and with the cool gaming computer and all that kind of stuff and then we have the office which is actually right above a florist it's really cool you can walk up the stairs and you smell roses love it always say i always get to stop and smell the roses every day and, and then also working out of picker joe's as well in the side office there tony morelan 29 26 so we talk a lot about savannah is that where you were born, or were you born and raised somewhere else? chris shomo 29 33 born and raised in the mountains of virginia and pulaski, virginia? oh, wow yeah so a little town called pulaski it's in the middle of the blue ridge mountains and it's your cool i guess mainstreet hometown recently it's been hit kind of a little hard from the economy my master's thesis in school for architecture was actually called the polanski institute of art design, which was taking the million square feet of the pulaski furniture plant and change it into a design school, which would in turn, hopefully help the economy and encourage businesses to open up to cater to students and yeah, that's pretty much what my master's thesis was first seen on my hometown but then, of course, i moved to savannah in 2000 and i've been there ever since tony morelan 30 29 so let's talk a little bit about marketing i mean, you are definitely one of the most successful designers for samsung tell me some of your tips and tricks when it comes to actually marketing your watch faces in your themes are you using social media? are you doing any additional advertising? what's your what's your approach to marketing? chris shomo 30 49 okay, so first off, i started out with the website, and just really making sure that it crawled on google so i'm always getting some sort of traffic and so either way website at any given moment can get like 200 to 500 hits a day, which, you know, that really helps just get the brand out there tony morelan 31 08 and share the url chris shomo 31 10 oh, it's www infinitywatchfaces com, and also social media, instagram and facebook we used to use google plus a lot it was a big designer community, but of course that's gone but that has shifted over to the facebook groups now and like the facebook group, that ash with iot gadgets, runs, it's one of the largest facebook groups out there and they have great moderation some good people are definitely running it and it's a great place to really show off your designs and spread the word to everybody and it has just a great following so i always recommend you know, get on social media and you just scream out your brand's everybody i actually tony morelan 31 55 interviewed ash iot gadgets on the podcast nice if you haven't listened to that yet, go back a few episodes it was a great, great time he's an excellent interview, great person doing amazing things and yeah, that facebook group is huge it's crazy chris shomo 32 11 yeah, it's crazy it's got to take a lot of time to moderate i'm sure it does but um, oh, and also on youtube we got our favorite watch face reviewer andrew tony morelan 32 22 jibber jab reviews yes and again, that came out of your presentation when you spoke at the conference you'd mentioned jibber jabber, and first thing i did when i became a watch-based designer was track jibber jabber reviews down on youtube and get him to review some of my watch faces i have just done a live chat with andrew, that we published last week great interview, he talks a lot about strategies, not only using youtube, but even beyond youtube for marketing your app so and i know you've got a great relationship with andrew, can i say this? can i share this? you're helping him with a new website that he's launching is that correct? chris shomo 32 59 yeah as the website is in the very beginning stages, it's going to grow over time doing some interesting work on pulling his youtube channel and all over the place and yeah, it's going to be something you're going to want to visit very often cause he's going to have some cool giveaways and a bunch of other stuff so, yeah, andrew is great to work with and it's interesting, because, you know, in the very beginning, he's tracking down watch face designers to do a review, and now everybody's tracking him down, of course, which is wonderful but, um, but yeah, he's done a phenomenal job and he's just, he's very vital to the community i totally agree i mean, andrew is a great guy and a lot of watch face designers owe their success to, to andrew so your watch faces and themes have a lot of animation so i want to ask about instagram a lot of times people just post pictures on instagram are you utilizing videos on instagram? oh, probably more video than anything else and a lot of that video is just taking my galaxy phone and just reading according the watch on my wrist, this is the first thing i want to do actually, as soon as i have a design, like even almost done, it's a work in progress and it's fun sometimes for your customers to see works in progress to see the early stage and, and all the work that goes into it as well and you'll find that you'll get a lot of a lot of following on there, which is great and, and a lot of times customers will, will critique it and you'll end up getting a better design in the very end because they kind of helped with the design process ah, that's awesome i think the first thing i do, of course, is i post on instagram and then the next thing i do is i head on over to that large facebook group and i started announcing there and, you know, i'll do some, you know, some works in progress, like post and that sort of thing you know, making sure that i replace that post as opposed to adding another one with, you know, the final, you know, work and just, you know, keep on updating that that sort of thing because you know, everybody's notified at the end another picture to a post they like so, yeah, just knowing these little tricks with social media and with instagram, knowing how to use your hashtags, it's all about hashtags on instagram, yeah, then you don't have to, to pay essentially, we're on facebook, you know, you might want to, you know, every once in a while, on paid advertise a little bit, sometimes it works but the main thing is being active with those groups, getting people to recognize your brand and getting repeat customers that also want to share your stuff, too tony morelan 35 30 and glad you mentioned the hashtags, we actually posted on our site, which is developer samsung com if you go to the galaxy store page, we actually posted a long list of valuable hashtags that you can use, whether your marketing your watch faces or your themes or apps or games so it's a great place to start to go take a look at some really good hashtags that could work chris shomo 35 52 nice and i just need to give a huge shout out and thank you to everybody with the samsung developers program because like i've also seen that grow over time and the resources available are just amazing and it's so helpful and you guys have yeah, even great every step along the way thank you tony morelan 36 13 yeah, no, you're welcome you're welcome you know, one of the things that we've done to try and help designers like yourself promote their apps is galaxy store badges, which i know that you use so a little bit about your experience with that, and where are you using those galaxy store badges? chris shomo 36 31 well, these badges are great because first they make you look legit they make you look professional, because they know, you know, it's 100% hey, this is available on the galaxy store and also being able to track the clicks and where people are coming from you can you can make a link specifically for a facebook promotion and you know, how many people you know clicked on that to participate in that so how do you know how where to grow unless you know where you stand and that helps you understand this statistics and where people are coming from so it's a valuable resource tony morelan 37 03 what about banner promotions? i love chris shomo 37 06 banner promotions you will see your best downloads during then that when you have one of those and ron is great yes, yeah, he helps guide you along just making sure that the banner looks great definitely everybody needs to take in his comments, everything that he tells you because i mean he, he's saying him for a reason so he will help your sales tony morelan 37 29 my biggest success came from a watch face that i had done that was featured on a banner promotion and it was crazy the amount of downloads and sales that were generated by having that banner promotion so for designers out there, once you've got a collection of strong designs, then you can approach samsung about being featured on a banner there is no cost to the banner, but there are a lot of people requesting it you have to be approved proved to actually have your designs featured on a banner but definitely worthwhile pursuing for sure chris shomo 38 07 and make sure that you have your social presence as well and all your facebook page and instagram page and all that when you submit for the banner because you know it's going to make you a better candidate for one tony morelan 38 18 yes, definitely they actually look at that they want to see previous downloads how much success you've already had so once you've got some experience, it's definitely worthwhile to at that point to reach out and then apply for a band promotion going back to your video, so you do have a lot of animation in your watch faces and your themes and i know you leverage video so talk a bit about youtube are you taking like all of these designs each time and posting them on youtube creating videos to expand your reach? chris shomo 38 44 most of them the main reason to do the video for me on youtube is to really have something dynamic to show on the galaxy store when someone sees that video after they land on your listing it really can be the difference as to whether they're going to buy it or not, and since most of mine offer animations to them, it makes sense to have a video to, to show it off one thing that i, i wish that the galaxy store had was an animated preview, like on like where the icon is, that was really cool because then everybody would be gravitating towards mine and other animated faces instantly but, but yeah, the youtube video is what really makes a difference and there are some watch faces that need to actually go back and make some videos for sometimes you finish the face and then of course, you're like, oh, now i have this whole production i got to make tony morelan 39 35 sure i totally agree with that and let me explain a little bit further about what you were talking about creating the video so that people can see it when they're viewing your galaxy store page so on the galaxy store page for a watch app, you have what are called screenshots and these screenshots show still images of your graphics that you use your marketing graphics however, there's also a way for you to include a little link to a video on youtube so you grab your youtube url, place it into your, your application for the, for this app and the very first screenshot will actually show your youtube video instead of the still image so it's a great way for users like you had mentioned, that want to see the motion, they can actually click on that screenshot, and it will launch the youtube video so it's a great way to market, you know, motion in your graphics so you had mentioned that your top theme is a free download so let's talk a little bit about the approach of offering apps for free because i know a lot of designers utilize the ability to you know, give away their apps and some designers are a little tight with that and they hold on to them and they don't do it where do you stand? i mean, are you using this as a marketing tool? do you just want to like get your brand out there? chris shomo 40 43 well, it started as a marketing tool, because you know, there's also a free section on the store, and if you don't exist on it, then well, it's just another avenue that people are not going to find you so you definitely need to make a free one and a good free one too just don't pick your worst design and be like, oh, i'm just going to make it free no, no, not at all it's not going to do any good so, for example, actually i did a watch face for jibber jabber reviews for andrew and that turned into my top downloading free watch face and that one at one time oh my goodness i think it was downloading like one to 3000 times a day tony morelan 41 22 wow so this is a branded jibber jabber reviews watch face yes so you so i actually remember when he posted his review of that i didn't realize that you were the designer behind that that's awesome yeah, chris shomo 41 35 but my name snuck on there like a little bit, but i wanted that to be mainly about him sure but yeah, not that one still gets downloaded like hundreds of times a day and stuff that very solid one and it gets reviews every single day to love it so having some free faces you can get discovered from people that you would have never discovered you before as well if you can get your watch face up to, you know, a certain section of the free section, which means it has to be good, essentially so, having done this now for several years, i'm sure you could face some challenges will first has been just the challenges of, you know, just growing with the software and understanding what you can do and taking advantage of updates to the software, like when the gyroscope became available and you could use that, oh my gosh, i was so happy when we could do that because that just adds a whole new level of dynamics to the watch faces and so it's really just, you know, learning your tools, but then also encountering that the watch face market has gotten a little bit congested with you know, there's a lot of people, you know, so you definitely have a lot more competition than when i first started out and, you know, i was just thinking the other day, i was like, wow, if i knew what i knew now, right in the very beginning, would i've been designing more sophisticated watch faces and have like a whole monopoly in the market or something like that, you know, you always think back like, oh my gosh, but no, no, i grew at a great rate with the software with the other designers you'll find that a lot of the other designers have become, you know, friends we all talk with each other yeah, we help out each other but yeah, it's a great community it really is tony morelan 43 22 talking about some of your favorite designers and who are the designers that you follow that you're inspired by? chris shomo 43 27 oh gosh, like jeweler broda like oh my gosh bergen of course like, those are great such clean watch faces i love those chris shomo 43 41 md matteo dini oh my gosh, like a little jealous there we'll have to say, but, but yeah, he's, um, the those are just a few of some of the amazing designers out there and a lot of great designers and, and again, the main thing is you know, everybody communicating and kind of working with each other? you feel like you are part of the community regularly tony morelan 44 07 yeah, that's what i've noticed i'm not too long ago actually did a podcast interview with tomas yes check from vienna studios yes yes great person yeah and he's done some amazing designs yeah, he's taken a different approach to watch face descending, where he designs extremely high end, very expensive watch faces that are in the hundreds of dollars and he is one of our top whitespace designers i mean, he has found a way to you know, make amazing revenue off of these high-end watch faces so yeah, i love the community it's been a lot of fun for me to not only be inspired by them when i was a watch face designer, but now being fortunate to be in a position working at samsung, i now get to have these conversations and then help out where i can with some of these you know, the rock stars of the watch facing design community chris shomo 45 04 that's awesome and i promise you that we all appreciate you too thank you so much tony morelan 45 09 thank you tony morelan 45 11 you've used galaxy watch studio for some time now, i'm going to ask you, what sort of features would you like to see added to it? so you'd mentioned about adding animations, maybe as a preview in the galaxy store but what other features would you like to see added to the galaxy watch studio, chris shomo 45 26 probably some little nitpicky things like being able to start and stop an animation with a click of a button that would be great to be able to have an animation react while your mobile for example, if i could have a guy that starts to run while i'm running, that would be cool to sure that would even take that joe watch face to another level, which would be awesome and then maybe in the future, and i think that someone was talking to me about this, but having the ability to do 3d and be able to put like a 3d mesh in there and have real shadows and that sort of thing who knows that that's really thinking into the future, that sort of thing sure and then if we look over to the theme side of things to my main one that i want right now is to have gyroscope action to have parallax effects i think that would add another dynamic to the theme designs tony morelan 46 25 yeah, i love that suggestion chris shomo 46 27 yeah so just, you know, just having like, you know, three to five layers that you could work with that could react with the gyroscope to mess with for like the regular background image people are looking at their phones, i don't even know how many times a day so let's make it like the best, most awesome dynamic experience ever and that would just be great tony morelan 46 48 that's what i mean wishes for that you know, and you were the first designer that i saw that truly leverage the gyroscope on the watch, where i can't remember the name of the watch face you had but as you rotated your wrist because of the gyro functionality these like metallic, big doors just like opened up to then show you know, the like data, you know whether it's the digital clock or heart rate, but it was so cool i could rotate my wrist and have these metal doors on my watch, paste, you know, collapse or open so that's how i first learned about the gyro is from your from your watch face design chris shomo 47 26 yeah, that as soon as they came out with the gyro is just like, oh, how can i use this to do like, tons of different things and i was thinking like a cuckoo clock, you know, when it opens up and that sort of thing so that kind of started at all and trying to think what the first one that i did using that is think it might have been digit glow spark tony morelan 47 45 that sounds right yeah so do you have any tips for designers when publishing on the galaxy store? i mean, we've mentioned a lot about marketing, but when it actually comes to, you know, creating the graphics behind their apps, what sort of tips could you give people and publishing on the galaxy store? chris shomo 48 05 definitely bone up on your photoshop skills, you got to design those thumbnails, don't just throw, you know, watch on a white background with the watch face on it because you really have to grab someone's attention talking from my website design experience, on average, you have about three seconds before someone clicks the back button or continues to read on the website it's kind of the same thing with watch face listing you know that you can have written information, everything, people aren't going to read it they're their visual, they want to look at the thumbnails and it starts with the icon as well make sure that icons looking good tony morelan 48 40 that's great are you familiar with the tool that i created called the asset creator? chris shomo 48 45 yes and i've actually been through it and i've used some of it to create some of my thumbnails and, you know, pulled some stuff out of it and threw some stuff in and that sort of thing so tony morelan 48 54 that's awesome yeah so super excited you know, we just announced galaxy watch three yes and so i spent a bit of time recently updating the asset creator to include all of the new watches for the galaxy watch three i just checked, you can actually go download the new updated version of the asset crater that includes all that that was just published recently so, in addition to that, i also have created what we call lifestyle photo packs, using the same tools within photoshop that allow you to use smart objects to quickly copy paste your design into a watch and have the perspective change and have the blurred change so that it truly just simply photoshopped right onto the watch i am madly working on new photos that show the galaxy watch three i will be publishing those very, very soon so super excited those have been a big success, a lot of help for people because it's not just showing your watch face on the watch just on a simple straight, you know, top down picture we're actually taking the watch and putting it into a scene so whether it is, you know, sitting on water drops, or it's on a slab of granite, or you know, some high-tech texture, these are great pictures to help using your screenshots when you're publishing your app so, look for those new galaxy watch three lifestyle photo packs coming out very, very cool chris shomo 50 22 i'm excited and one thing that's cool about that is it allows the customer to relate to the watch and wearing that watch face more by having photos like that so that that's great you can get your customer to relate to your product, you're golden, an architecture professor actually told me one time that a building or a product, any type of product, it is 10% your ideas and 90% the way you present them so if you can't present it right then your product is not going to mean anything tony morelan 50 55 so what is in the future for infinity watch face design tell me what can we get excited about? what's happening? chris shomo 51 02 oh gosh, what is in the future? we got so many things in the future, we're going to have some games come out, you know, break into the, the other part of the app world still continues with wearables of course, we're going to expand our video production as well working on that and infinity watch faces is going to be getting really involved with local businesses really soon, and helping promote their businesses to other local people and visitors ever since this whole pandemic, things going on local businesses have been hit so hard, we've lost a few in our neighborhood i just don't want to lose any more so i'll be going out and you know, just really doing what i can to tony morelan 51 49 help that's wonderful yeah, these are definitely challenging times you know, it's been a while now that we've all kind of been in this sort of lockdown and we've realized the effects that this has really had on our economy, it's also been an opportunity for us to try and find new ways to, you know, to still do the work that we do and in the reach that we do so it's nice to hear that you're, you know, finding ways to sort of help out in all of that aspect so, going back to the fun designs that you create, i need to ask you right now, which if you have to pick one, and then you've got 390 plus, i want you to pick one design, what is your current favorite? chris shomo 52 36 i know this is going to sound a little goofy, maybe a little girly the butterfly named fred love it's not very i think because the way the flowers interact with your wrist and then that that butterfly just landing perfectly right there on it every single time it makes me happy and the dude's name is fred come like fred butterfly tony morelan 52 59 how did you come up? fred for the butterfly, chris shomo 53 02 i don't know i was just kind of looking at an insect one day and i named an insect fred and then i was like, ah, this butterfly should be named fred now, i mean, i could have called it something like beautiful butterfly or blue butterfly or you know, just some sort of whatever name but let's give him an actual name and let's make a character out of this yeah wow, that is a great story i'm going to close this podcast though by asking what does chris sharma do for fun when you're not designing these wild themes and wild watch faces? oh, i live in the city of fun i mean, just going around and you know, going to experience the different restaurants and just the atmosphere in the summertime, i guess staying indoors more because it's so hot and humid down there someone asked me one time what's it like living in the south during all this heat because like just the other day that heat index was like 105 degrees that's of course, when you combine the humidity and the actual temperature, that's what it feels like and i told him when i was like, alright, take the hottest shower that you can now get out of the shower, do not dry off and put your clothes on that's what it feels like oh, so it's a sauna out there tony morelan 54 22 that's crazy you know, and i will say i have to share we've had to reschedule this interview numerous times, because there was a hurricane going through savannah and you were losing your internet connection so yeah, living in the south, i think definitely has a lot of excitement chris shomo 54 37 well, the hurricane is actually one of the normal things for 2020 chris shomo 54 43 we were very fortunate that the hurricane mainly missed us we got some wind from the outer bands and locally, my internet was like, it was all over the place we didn't have it and we had a flood yeah, it's just something that we got to deal with but i'm glad we were fine hazleton connect and get this interview done tony morelan 55 03 yeah, this is great this has been a lot of fun so chris, thank you very much for joining the podcast much access to you at infinity watch faces and looking forward to all the great new designs i know they're going to be coming down the road for us so thanks again chris shomo 55 15 thank you, tony and thank you, samsung, you guys are awesome outro 55 18 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e10-chris-shomo.html

Develop Galaxy Watch for Tizen

doc

Native App

create your first tizen wearable native application welcome to tizen wearable native application development! a wearable native application is created using the c language, and can be run on tizen wearable devices the application uses the native api, which provides various interfaces to the device hardware allowing you to take advantage of numerous capabilities tailored to run with limited device resources study the following instructions to help familiarize yourself with the tizen native application development process as well as using the tizen studio and installing the created application on the emulator or target device with the instructions, you can create and run a basic wearable native application, which displays some text on the screen with no user interaction before you get started with developing tizen applications, download and install the tizen studio for more information on the installation process, see the installation guide create a wearable native project using the tizen studio this step shows how you can use a predesigned project template that creates all the basic files and folders required for your project build the application after you have implemented code for the features you want, this step shows how you can build the application to validate and compile the code run the application this step shows how you can run the application on the emulator or a real target device design a ui this step shows how you can create the application ui and make small alterations to it to improve the usability of your application when you are developing a more complex application, you can take advantage of the native tools included in the tizen studio to ease the tasks of creating functionality and designing the application ui creating a project the following example shows you how to create and configure a basic wearable native application project in the tizen studio an application project contains all the files that make up an application the following figure illustrates the application to be created the application screen displays the hello tizen text and no user interaction is provided if you click the back key on the device, the application moves to the background figure wearable native basic ui application to create the application project launch the tizen studio in the tizen studio menu, select file > new > tizen project the project wizard opens in the project wizard, define the project details the project wizard is used to create the basic application skeleton with the required folder structure and mandatory files you can easily create different applications by selecting an applicable template or sample for the project wizard to use select the template project type and click next select the profile wearable and version from a drop-down list and click next the version depends on the platform version you have installed and with which you are developing the application select the native application application type and click next select the basic ui template and click next define the project properties and click finish you can enter the project name 3-50 characters and the unique package id you can also select the location and working sets by clicking more properties the project wizard sets up the project, creates the application files using the default content from the template, and closes for more information on the project wizard and the available templates, see creating tizen projects with tizen project wizard you can see the created project in the project explorer view the most important files and folders include inc default folder for included source files res folder for resource files used by the application only shared folder for resource files to be shared with other applications src folder for source code files lib folder for external library files tizen-manifest xml manifest file used by the platform to install and launch the application figure application in the project explorer note you can view and modify the application configuration in the manifest editor in this example, no configuration changes are required your application project is now ready for further actions next, build the application managing the application configuration to view and modify the application configuration in the project explorer view, double-click the tizen-manifest xml file of the application the tizen studio opens the file in the manifest editor in the manifest editor, view and modify the configuration details using the various tabs overview define general information, such as the package, label, and icon of the application features define required software and hardware features this information is used for application filtering in the tizen store privileges define the security-sensitive apis or api groups accessed and used by the application localization define localized values for the application label, description, and icon advanced define advanced features, such as application metadata, data control for services, application control functionalities, and account details source view and edit the source code of the tizen-manifest xml file changes made and saved on the other tabs are reflected in the source code and vice versa note the tizen-manifest xml file must conform to both the xml file format and the tizen native application specification requirements editing the file in the source tab is intended for advanced users only to save any changes, in the tizen studio menu, select file > save all for more information on configuring the application, see setting the application manifest understanding the source code pay attention to the life-cycle callbacks in the application source code, to understand how the application works for source code details related to the ui, see designing a simple ui the main function in the src/basicui c file is used to register callbacks that manage specific parts of the application life-cycle app_create called when the application process starts used to create ui components app_terminate called while the application process is terminating called after the main loop quits app_resume ui applications only called when the application window is shown app_pause ui applications only called when the application window is totally hidden app_control called after the app_create callback when the process starts called when a launch request is received while the process is running can receive app_control data parameters for launching the application used to implement parameter-specific actions of the application int main int argc, char *argv[] { appdata_s ad = {0,}; int ret = 0; ui_app_lifecycle_callback_s event_callback = {0,}; app_event_handler_h handlers[5] = {null,}; event_callback create = app_create; event_callback terminate = app_terminate; event_callback pause = app_pause; event_callback resume = app_resume; event_callback app_control = app_control; ret = ui_app_main argc, argv, &event_callback, &ad ; if ret != app_error_none dlog_print dlog_error, log_tag, "app_main failed err = %d", ret ; return ret; } building your application after you have created the application project, you can implement the required features in this example, only the default features from the project template are used, and no code changes are required when your application code is ready, you must build the application the building process performs a validation check and compiles your files you can build the application in the following ways automatically the automatic build means that the tizen studio automatically rebuilds the application whenever you change a source or resource file and save the application project to use the automatic build select the project in the project explorer view in the tizen studio menu, select project > build automatically a check mark appears next to the menu option you can toggle the automatic build on and off by reselecting project > build automatically manually the manual build means that you determine yourself when the application is built to manually build the application, right-click the project in the project explorer view and select build project figure manually building the application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following in the tizen studio menu, select project > build project press the f10 key you can have more than one build configuration to see the current active configuration or change it, right-click the project in the project explorer view and select build configurations > set active the default configuration is debug for more information, see building applications after you have built the application, run it running your application you can run the application on the emulator or a real target device running on the emulator to run the application on the emulator launch an emulator instance in the emulator manager in the tizen studio menu, select tools > emulator manager in the emulator manager, select a wearable emulator from the list and click launch if no applicable emulator instance exists, create a new one the emulator is launched in its own window you can also see the new emulator instance and its folder structure in the device manager generate a security profile before you run the application, you must sign your application package with a certificate profile in the tizen studio run the application in the project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > tizen native application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following press the ctrl + f11 key click the run icon in the toolbar if you have created multiple emulator instances, select the instance you want from the combo box in the toolbar before selecting to run the application if you select an offline emulator, it is automatically launched when you select to run the application confirm that the application launches on the emulator note if the emulator display has switched off, you cannot see the application launch to switch the display on, click the power key in the lower-right corner of the emulator while the application is running, the **log** view in the tizen studio shows the log, debug, and exception messages from the methods defined in the log macros to see the view, in the tizen studio menu, go to **window \> show view \> log** for more information on using the emulator features, see using emulator control keys, menu, and panel and using extended emulator features running on a target device to run the application on a target device connect the wearable target device to your computer define settings on the device go to settings > connections, and switch on wi-fi the device and the computer must be connected to the same wi-fi network note the ip address the device is using go to settings > gear info, and switch on the debugging mode use the remote device manager to connect the wearable device in the device manager, launch the remote device manager by clicking the related icon in the remote device manager window, click + in the add device window, enter the device and network details use the ip address you noted before , and click add in the remote device manager window, switch the new device on by clicking the switch under connect the device asks for user confirmation to allow gear to read log data, copy files to and from your computer, and install the application manually, click the accept mark in the device manager, confirm that the device is connected shown in the device list generate an author certificate before you run the application, you must sign your application package with a certificate profile in the tizen studio run the application in the device manager, select the device in project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > tizen native application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following press the ctrl + f11 key click the run icon in the toolbar if you have both a connected device and existing emulator instances, select the device from the combo box in the toolbar before selecting to run the application confirm that the application launches on the target device note the application is launched using the default debug run configuration to create and use another configuration in the project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > run configurations in the run configurations window, click the new launch configuration icon , define the configuration details, and launch the application by clicking run designing a simple ui the wearable application created with the basic ui template has a simple user interface with a label component showing the hello tizen text at the top of the screen the ui is created using efl figure user interface in the basic ui template creating the basic ui the ui in the basic ui template contains the following components the efl ui always contains a window component, which is the root component of the entire ui since the application has the indicator bar at the top of the screen, it requires the conformant component the text label is implemented with a label component the ui is created in the basicui c file data structure a pointer to the ui components is stored in the appdata_s data structure struct appdata { /* window */ evas_object *win; /* conformant */ evas_object *conform; /* label */ evas_object *label; }; typedef struct appdata appdata_s; ui creation the app_create life-cycle callback is called when the application main loop starts, and it calls the create_base_gui function to create the ui static bool app_create void *data { /* hook to take necessary actions before the main event loop starts initialize ui resources and application data if this function returns true, the application main loop starts if this function returns false, the application is terminated */ appdata_s *ad = data; create_base_gui ad ; return true; } ui components the create_base_gui function creates the ui components window, conformant, and label the function receives a pointer to fill in the appdata_s structure static void create_base_gui appdata_s *ad { the window component is created with the elm_win_util_standard_add function callbacks are also added for the window one of the callbacks handles the delete,request event when the window is to be closed, and the other handles the eext_callback_back event when the hardware back key is pressed /* window create and initialize elm_win, which is mandatory to manipulate a window */ ad->win = elm_win_util_standard_add package, package ; elm_win_autodel_set ad->win, eina_true ; if elm_win_wm_rotation_supported_get ad->win { int rots[4] = {0, 90, 180, 270}; elm_win_wm_rotation_available_rotations_set ad->win, const int * &rots , 4 ; } evas_object_smart_callback_add ad->win, "delete,request", win_delete_request_cb, null ; eext_object_event_callback_add ad->win, eext_callback_back, win_back_cb, ad ; the conformant component is needed to show the indicator bar at the top of the screen the component is the first object added inside the window with the elm_conformant_add function the elm_win_indicator_mode_set function decides whether the indicator is visible, and the elm_win_indicator_opacity_set function sets the indicator opacity mode the conformant component is set as a resize object of the window by using the elm_win_resize_object_add function it means that the conformant size and position are controlled by the window component directly the evas_object_show function makes the conformant component visible /* conformant create and initialize elm_conformant, which is mandatory for the base gui to have a proper size when an indicator or virtual keypad is visible */ ad->conform = elm_conformant_add ad->win ; elm_win_indicator_mode_set ad->win, elm_win_indicator_show ; elm_win_indicator_opacity_set ad->win, elm_win_indicator_opaque ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->conform, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; elm_win_resize_object_add ad->win, ad->conform ; evas_object_show ad->conform ; the label component for the text is added with the elm_label_add function the label is added inside the conformant component, which is the label's parent the label text is set with the elm_object_text_set function /* label create an actual view of the base gui modify this part to change the view */ ad->label = elm_label_add ad->conform ; elm_object_text_set ad->label, "<align=center>hello tizen</align>" ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->label, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->label ; when all the ui components are ready, the evas_object_show function makes the window component visible this means that the window displays everything on the screen at once /* show the window after the base gui is set up */ evas_object_show ad->win ; } modifying existing components when the basic ui exists, you can easily modify the components in the ui by using the component-specific functions, or more general evas object functions for example, the following modifications to the label component change the label style to a marker making the text bold and increase the font size to 50 /* label */ ad->label = elm_label_add ad->conform ; elm_object_text_set ad->label, "<align=center><font_size=50>hello tizen</font/></align>" ; elm_object_style_set ad->label, "marker" ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->label, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->label ; figure modified label component adding more components and functionality the basic ui only contains one visible label component you can use it as a basis to design a more elaborate ui with more components, screens, and functionality the following example shows how to add a list to the existing view screen , and how to create a second view and move between the 2 views all the code changes in this section are made within the create_base_gui function, unless stated otherwise to add more content to the ui modify the existing label view to contain a list too to add more components, first create a container that can hold all the various components in one view in this example, the box container is used it is created and added to the conformant the new list is created, and then the new list and the existing label component are both added to the box add the box and list objects to the appdata_s data structure struct appdata { evas_object *win; evas_object *conform; evas_object *label; /* box */ evas_object *box; /* list */ evas_object *list; }; typedef struct appdata appdata_s; create the box component using the conformant as the parent, and set the box as the conformant content ad->box = elm_box_add ad->conform ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->box, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; evas_object_show ad->box ; elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->box ; modify the existing label component to use box as a parent, and add it to the box /* modify the label code */ ad->label = elm_label_add ad->box ; elm_object_text_set ad->label, "<align=center>hello tizen</align>" ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->label, 0 0, 0 0 ; /* comment out the elm_object_content_set function */ /* elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->label ; */ evas_object_size_hint_align_set ad->label, evas_hint_fill, evas_hint_fill ; evas_object_size_hint_min_set ad->label, 50, 50 ; /* show and add to box */ evas_object_show ad->label ; elm_box_pack_end ad->box, ad->label ; create the list and add it to the box create a list component with the elm_list_add function the box component is the parent of the new list component add items to the list with the elm_list_item_append function int i; /* create the list */ ad->list = elm_list_add ad->box ; /* set the list size */ evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->list, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; evas_object_size_hint_align_set ad->list, evas_hint_fill, evas_hint_fill ; for i = 0; i < 4; i++ { char tmp[8]; snprintf tmp, sizeof tmp , "item %d", i + 1 ; /* add an item to the list */ elm_list_item_append ad->list, tmp, null, null, null, null ; } /* show and add to box */ evas_object_show ad->list ; elm_box_pack_end ad->box, ad->list ; when you run the application, the screen now shows the label at the top and the list in the middle create another view and navigate between the views the previous step created a view that contained a box component with a list component in the box to create an application with multiple views, you need to add a naviframe component to the application add the naviframe and naviframe item objects to the appdata_s data structure struct appdata { evas_object *win; evas_object *conform; evas_object *label; evas_object *box; evas_object *list; /* naviframe */ evas_object *navi; /* item */ elm_object_item *navi_item; }; typedef struct appdata appdata_s; create the naviframe using the conformant as the parent ad->navi = elm_naviframe_add ad->conform ; evas_object_show ad->navi ; elm_object_content_set ad->conform, ad->navi ; modify the box component to have the naviframe as a parent ad->box = elm_box_add ad->navi ; evas_object_size_hint_weight_set ad->box, evas_hint_expand, evas_hint_expand ; evas_object_show ad->box ; elm_object_content_set ad->navi, ad->box ; push the box to the naviframe as a top item to create the first view the second parameter defines a title text for the view each application view is a separate item in the naviframe, and the top item is always displayed ad->navi_item = elm_naviframe_item_push ad->navi, "first view", null, null, ad->box, null ; create the navigation between the views by adding a clicked,double event callback to the list when the user double-clicks the item, the second view opens for clarity, change the first list item text to go to second /* change the first list item text */ elm_object_item *it; it = elm_list_first_item_get ad->list ; elm_object_item_text_set it, "go to second" ; /* add a callback */ evas_object_smart_callback_add ad->list, "clicked,double", list_item_doubleclicked_cb, ad->navi ; in the list item double-click event callback, define the content for the second view create a prev button to return to the first view, and push the button to the naviframe as a new top item also create the prev button callback for popping the top item from the naviframe, and consequently displaying the first view add both the new functions before the create_base_gui function static void prev_btn_clicked_cb void *data, evas_object *obj, void *event_info { evas_object *nf = data; elm_naviframe_item_pop nf ; } static void list_item_doubleclicked_cb void *data, evas_object *obj, void *event_info { evas_object *navi_button; evas_object *nf = data; elm_object_item *nf_it; navi_button = elm_button_add nf ; elm_object_text_set navi_button, "prev" ; elm_object_style_set navi_button, "bottom" ; evas_object_smart_callback_add navi_button, "clicked", prev_btn_clicked_cb, nf ; nf_it = elm_naviframe_item_push nf, "second view", null, null, navi_button, null ; }

https://developer.samsung.com/galaxy-watch-tizen/creating-your-first-app/native.html

Develop Smart TV

doc

Overview

samsung checkout this topic describes how you can develop a billing system for your application, to allow users to make purchases within your application related info billing api productinfo api sso api samsung checkout dpi portal guide samsung checkout for tizen net samsung checkout dpi portal samsung checkout on tv samples samsung checkout web application samsung checkout net application samsung checkout offers an optimized purchase experience for your users on samsung tvs the user can quickly and safely register a payment method and make frictionless payments repeatedly within the tv environment in addition, samsung checkout provides a comprehensive global monetization platform, which allows you to integrate various business models and promotional campaigns into your services the tv-optimized purchase experience provides the user a quick and simple 3-step checkout, once a payment method is registered the checkout requires only number-centric information to be entered, making it easy to use with a tv remote control users can register their payment method directly on the tv or through a mobile phone to use samsung checkout, the user needs tv samsung smart tv, 2016 or later model supporting tizen excluding evolution kit payment method credit or debit card, paypal, or samsung pay in korea, united states security tizen secureime, 2nd-screen card registration mobile or pc account samsung account for sharing account and payment information with galaxy phones importanta samsung account is mandatory for using samsung checkout samsung checkout assumes that the user is logged in to samsung account at all times samsung checkout provides one solution for payment execution ✔ one solution supports all functions from payment operation ✔ operate automatically settlement and payout strong security payment solution ✔ acquire pci-dss certification and follow regulation each of countries psd2 ✔ following psd2 regulantion and gdpr deliver the coupon/promotional code in various ways of distribution with easiest ux ✔ issue coupons for promotion provide dpi digital product inventory system ✔ create and manage service items ✔ check the status of sales amounts and transaction scale ✔ refund and cancel subscription you can manage your product application and product sales through the dpi digital product inventory and process the actual purchase through samsung checkout importantall application data that is saved locally on a tv is deleted when the application is deleted from that tv if the user's purchase history is saved only in the tv storage and not remotely, and the user deletes and reinstalls the application, all application settings and content are removed, including purchased content if your application saves purchase information in the tv storage only, inform the user that uninstalling the application deletes their purchased content the dpi portal provides functions, such as "purchase history unapply" and "refund", to help you address situations when your customer inadvertently deletes application data before proceeding with the unapply and refund processes, you must contact a samsung representative by going to "samsung apps tv seller office > support" and creating a "1 1 q&a" support ticket samsung checkout purchase process when a user wants to purchase a product on your application, samsung checkout provides a common purchase gui, which identifies the user and confirms first the purchase and then the purchase completion after the user completes the purchase, samsung checkout returns the purchase result to your application product, purchase, and payment management the following figure illustrates how you can use samsung checkout and the information in the dpi server to manage in-app purchases and payments in your application request the purchase list retrieve the customer purchase list using a purchase list api request respond to the purchase list content if there are products in the purchase list which are not applied, verify the purchase and apply the products if there are products in the purchase list which have been refunded, retrieve the products send the application result to the server request the product list request the product information list using a products list api request the user purchases the product when the user selects “buy” in the application, provide a common purchase gui through samsung checkout the user can enter a voucher or coupon code to modify the purchase price the user confirms the purchase by entering a pin on the common purchase gui, or biometric information on samsung pay samsung checkout delivers the purchase result to your application request the purchase list update the customer purchase list verify the purchase verify the purchase using a verify purchase api request apply the product apply the product using an apply product api request, and send the application result to the server payment flow with dynamic product in case that partner already has cms server which manage products and price, and it is required to change the product information frequently, partner and samsung can discuss to use dynamic product when they integrate samsung checkout and once they agree on that products and prices will be managed by cms of partner not by samsung’s dpi, partner need to register a representative item on dpi so that samsung checkout system can display information on samsung smart tv app/game store which is legally required partner does not need to register each products on dpi that they sells in their app, however, they should builds and operates its own cms to manage products information including prices and provide rest api for verification of purchase requests the following figure shows data flow of initialize stage in payment process with dynamic product additional requirement for dpi as model require partner cms to manage product information, there is additional requirement that partner need to do for dpi settings verification/no verification ‘verification’ is a recommended option otherwise partner has to handle the verification process by themselves and take all the responsibility for all the error cases related to verification process if ‘verification’ is selected, ‘verify uri’ is also required this uri should serve the function of checking product information such as product itself, price and currency in sequence of initialization during payment process price setting price range information of products that you actually sells in your app is required by country it is not used for actual payment for providing the app information on samsung smart tv app/game store which is legally required thus, it has to be updated when the price range of your products is changed difference when dynamic product when buyitem unlike ordinary purchase, when dynamic product, partner need to set values as below in order to complete payment process "orderitemid" - representative productid that registered to dpi portal as dynamic product type "ordertitle" - customized name for each purchase displayed as in figure 9 "ordertotal" - customized price for each purchase displayed as in figure 9 "dynmcproductid" - unique product id managed by partner cms when verify product partner need to strictly verify the below values in order to identify if it's appropriate product information "appid" - if it's appropriate application for this payment process "productid" - if this is same as representative productid from dpi portal "productprice" - if price of product that partner intended to sell to user "dynmcproductid" - if this is is appropriate id that are under control of partner cms checkout service county/location list no area country eng biz model 1 north america canada agent 2 north america united states commissionaire 3 europe aland islands commissionaire 4 europe albania agent 5 europe austria commissionaire 6 europe belgium commissionaire 7 europe bosnia and herzegovina agent 8 europe bulgaria commissionaire 9 europe croatia commissionaire 10 europe cyprus commissionaire 11 europe czech republic commissionaire 12 europe denmark commissionaire 13 europe estonia commissionaire 14 europe faroe islands commissionaire 15 europe finland commissionaire 16 europe france commissionaire 17 europe germany commissionaire 18 europe greece commissionaire 19 europe greenland commissionaire 20 europe guernsey commissionaire 21 europe hungary commissionaire 22 europe iceland agent 23 europe ireland commissionaire 24 europe isle of man commissionaire 25 europe italy commissionaire 26 europe jersey commissionaire 27 europe latvia commissionaire 28 europe lithuania commissionaire 29 europe luxembourg commissionaire 30 europe montenegro agent 31 europe netherlands commissionaire 32 europe north macedonia agent 33 europe norway commissionaire 34 europe poland commissionaire 35 europe portugal commissionaire 36 europe romania commissionaire 37 europe serbia agent 38 europe slovakia commissionaire 39 europe slovenia commissionaire 40 europe spain commissionaire 41 europe sweden commissionaire 42 europe switzerland agent 43 europe united kingdom commissionaire 44 asia australia agent 45 asia hong kong agent 46 asia india agent 47 asia indonesia agent 48 asia korea, republic of agent 49 asia malaysia agent 50 asia new zealand agent 51 asia philippines agent 52 asia singapore agent 53 asia taiwan agent 54 asia thailand agent 55 asia vietnam agent 56 cis belarus agent 57 cis kazakhstan agent 58 cis kyrgyzstan agent 59 cis moldova agent 60 cis mongolia agent 61 cis russian federation agent 62 cis tajikistan agent 63 cis turkmenistan agent 64 cis ukraine agent 65 cis uzbekistan agent 66 latam argentina agent 67 latam bolivia agent 68 latam brazil agent 69 latam chile agent 70 latam colombia agent 71 latam costa rica agent 72 latam dominican republic agent 73 latam ecuador agent 74 latam guatemala agent 75 latam mexico agent 76 latam panama agent 77 latam peru agent 78 latam venezuela agent 79 mena algeria agent 80 mena bahrain agent 81 mena egypt agent 82 mena ghana agent 83 mena iraq agent 84 mena israel agent 85 mena jordan agent 86 mena kenya agent 87 mena kuwait agent 88 mena lebanon agent 89 mena libya agent 90 mena mauritius agent 91 mena morocco agent 92 mena nigeria agent 93 mena oman agent 94 mena pakistan agent 95 mena qatar agent 96 mena saudi arabia agent 97 mena south africa agent 98 mena tunisia agent 99 mena turkey agent 100 mena united arab emirates agent 101 mena yemen agent 102 latam paraguay agent 103 latam uruguay agent 104 latam el salvador agent 105 latam honduras agent 106 latam nicaragua agent 107 latam bahamas agent 108 latam jamaica agent 109 latam trinidad & tobago agent 110 asia cambodia agent 111 asia myanmar agent 112 asia laos agent 113 asia macao agent 114 asia bangladesh agent 115 asia nepal agent 116 asia sri lanka agent 117 cis armenia agent 118 cis azerbaijan agent 119 cis georgia agent 120 europe liechtenstein agent

https://developer.samsung.com/smarttv/develop/guides/samsung-checkout/samsung-checkout.html

Learn Developers Podcast

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Episode 7, Tomas Joscak

season 1, episode 7 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest tomas joscak head designer, vienna studios in this episode of pow, i interview tomas joscak from vienna studios tomas is an amazing watch face designer, winning the 2019 best of galaxy store award for best indie watch face designer some of his designs? he's priced them in the hundreds dollars and people are buying them and, the software he uses to create the graphics? it's typically not used for designing watch faces you’ll want to listen in and learn not only how he designs high-end watch faces, but also his tips on marketing listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy store coupons galaxy store badges banner promotions social media multi-language support best of galaxy store awards transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcasts of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech trends and give insight to all the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show i interview tomas joscak from vienna studios tomas is an amazing watch face designer, even won the 2019 best of galaxy store award for best indie watch face designer some of his designs, he's priced them in the hundreds of dollars, and people are buying them and the software he uses to create the graphics it's typically not used for designing watch faces you're going to be surprised enjoy so thomas, tell me who is thomas joscak tomas joscak 00 48 welcome, i just check interesting question oh, well, i will describe myself as somebody who has to learn as an example and cool class storage goals i said one goal a few years ago, i wanted to run a marathon so i prepare myself one year long and afterwards, i barely use the sport shoes so then i have other goals again tony morelan 01 18 so it sounds like maybe a short attention span that you're into something for a brief moment and then after that you move on to the next challenge tomas joscak 01 27 yes, definitely tony morelan 01 29 so tell me, how did you get your start in design, tomas joscak 01 32 design was always kind of a hobby of myself and even if i do have two phds in natural sciences, i always have to be somewhere in a field where nobody had been before so it is a research where i'm working on something new, or i'm producing something new in the field of design i love it tony morelan 02 00 so you're so your education is not design base you said you have two phds in natural sciences tomas joscak 02 05 yes, yes, i never studied design tony morelan 02 08 wow it's pretty amazing because i mean truthfully you are one of the top sellers on the galaxy store when it comes to watch faces and you know your quality is amazing so to hear that that is really coming out of as a hobby is pretty impressive tell me how did you first hear about the samsung galaxy watch tomas joscak 02 26 the exact moment i cannot remember right now however, i cannot forget the first day after my first launch phase having published on galaxy store and after i looked at the statistic and there have been more than 4000 downloads for this first model myself i was surprised shocked and i definitely knew that this might be something you how did you first hear about selling tony morelan 02 53 watch faces, you know in using our software galaxy watch designer at the time which is now a galaxy watch studio tomas joscak 03 00 okay, i was starting designing workspaces in a phasor creator studio before so i had some basics already learned before and so switching to galaxy stir was actually nothing new from the big difference was only the market, which seems to be extremely huge from my point of view tony morelan 03 26 so the market for the galaxy watch faces is much bigger than the market when you're producing them through facer? tomas joscak 03 32 yes, at least, this was my impression one year before tony morelan 03 36 okay, so how long have you been designing watch faces tomas joscak 03 39 right now it is three years i know it before i got my first model, which for my brand as a present to my 14-year celebration party and since then, my i'm just playing with watch faces tony morelan 03 53 or so is this what you do full time or do you have like a is this a side gig for you? this is, you know, what's your main focus? for income tomas joscak 04 02 at the moment is my full-time job and he has is creating nice income actually the best i ever had before even if i compare it with my company in vienna a few years ago tony morelan 04 15 in what was that company, tomas joscak 04 17 this was a pure research company at a field of renewable materials so completely different staff we had up to seven employees but however, from the revenue point of view now it's even bigger tony morelan 04 31 wow so you are based in austria but tell me where are you originally from? tomas joscak 04 36 so i was born in czechoslovakia, in slovakia in part where am actually right now as we are speaking, this podcast together, i was doing my parents and afterwards i got few opportunities in austria and germany and so i stayed in austria tony morelan 04 53 and is it just yourself or do you have employees tomas joscak 04 57 at the moment? my brother is strongly supporting me creating also some brands, domino's martinez, a luxury brand from our portfolio is coming from him so we are two full time now working at this project and sometimes we are cooperating with tony morelan 05 16 freelancers in this globally he'll reach out to freelancers from around the world to have you help with some of the design aspects tomas joscak 05 23 yes, we use platform where different designers are implemented or can make some projects corporation tony morelan 05 32 do you work out of your house? or do you actually have a place of business tomas joscak 05 36 i started as maybe also other designers in my kitchen so my first project so first watch faces have been created in a kitchen afterwards, i go to one room in my flat, and at the moment, we do have an office with my brother and as a next step, we would like to establish a full time or full-size photo studio tony morelan 06 02 okay, okay so i noticed that you have actually four different brands when you go to your website vienna studios com there's actually four different brands on their vienna studios masterpieces we are watching as well as dominus matthias, can you explain the different brands? tomas joscak 06 21 we have many different brands and actually the basic order first one has been vienna studios, which started everything else domino's martinez is luxury brand for my brother, as i mentioned before, is really creating original design i'm more focusing on the functionality and if you're asking about many brands, we are dividing different products into brands, according to price segment, basically tony morelan 06 52 yeah and let's talk a little bit about that because, you know, one thing that's unique with your brand is that you've got some very high-priced watch faces i mean, it's my understanding you have watch faces you know, you've been in the above $100 $200 tell me about those high-level price watch faces and why is it that you decided to offer them so expensive? tomas joscak 07 16 well, we started, i started to sell my watch faces at 199 $1 99 yes, dollar 99 for a piece however, this space is so competitive and it's really hard to be a good designer in this place that after i could feel skills and i was able to prepare high complicated watch faces, i decided to offer them for higher prices and actually, at the moment, you're correctly we are offering different special watch faces up to 400 was dollar per piece tony morelan 07 55 wow, that's amazing so another amazing aspect to you is that you actually won best of galaxy store award in 2019 can you tell me what the award was that you won and what that means to you? tomas joscak 08 08 i can remember well, this call will shout and charlotte called me and mentioned in a wonder indian designer 2019 only after nine months really to be full in the business, so i was completely shocked and even more impressed by the fact that we are to four bestsellers worldwide, so i would never expect it such a sexist after a few months tony morelan 08 39 that's amazing that's amazing and that's when i actually first met you is when you came out to the award show that i was hosting, to give you the award for best indie designer, so congratulations again so i want to talk a little bit about marketing and some of your tips and approaches for marketing tell me about your use of coupons tomas joscak 08 59 coupons is a big project for us it's excellent instrument however we use coupons very solely and actually, as a customer or a fan of vienna studios or dominus martinez, you can win a free coupon once a mount so this is the way how some people could get our expensive watch faces even for free tony morelan 09 28 okay, that's great that's great i also noticed that you when you go to your website, you actually are doing promotions where you're giving away actual watches so tell me a little bit how you're utilizing that as a promotional giveaway tomas joscak 09 42 yes, after a few months, as you mentioned before, we are pretty successful in the business and we try to give something back to nice community which is growing and we do have more than 3000 subscribers at our website and everybody who is subscribing there has a chance now to be not only free coupons, possibly, but also a smartwatch galaxy watch active two at the moment we are running this giveaway until end of this year, and we will think about something new for the next year tony morelan 10 19 excellent that's a great way to build your subscription community it's interesting, i can tell that you've got a lot of marketing experience so tell me a bit about how did you gain that marketing experience? is this something that you're just learning, you know, on the fly right now? or do you have a background a little bit with them with when it comes to marketing? tomas joscak 10 36 i think a good opportunity to learn this stuff was to have my own company so i am partly not only a designer, but also a kind of businessman so we are always forming activities and evaluating it and checking what is working for us, where we do see some revenue streams who are not and this elevation happened maybe on a daily or weekly basis so there's a lot of adjustment and trial and error actions we are using tony morelan 11 13 that's great it's great to be so active when you're, you know, figuring out your marketing approach, or using any social channels like instagram to promote your watch faces tomas joscak 11 23 we are in instagram right now we do have a couple of thousands of followers however, we are not sure if this will be our future instruments, at the moment as a best a marketing instrument for us is to collect email addresses through subscription of our website, which was also in a recommendation from around from samsung, who don't know us this feature could bring something even after maybe three months of my activity at galaxy store thank you okay thank you here's tony morelan 12 02 ron's got a lot of great advice ron's the one who he runs our forums so yeah, much appreciation to ron what about galaxy store badges? are you using any badges on your on your platform to help promote your watch faces? tomas joscak 12 17 yes, we are using standard general veggies for our different stores and those are placed actually in description of our watch faces as well as the instagram on or on our website tony morelan 12 33 excellent and i know that badges are a great way for you to go back and see the analytics you know the data on what's driving your sales so always happy to hear when designers are using the using badges what about banner promotions, have you had a chance to be featured on any of the banner promotions on the galaxy store? tomas joscak 12 50 yes, we are featured in the banner promotion is always a great and profitable issue for us or the banner can drive the revenue really high so the laughter banner promotion and we are happy that we are in tony morelan 13 11 sure and for any new designers out there that are listening in band promotions they run for is it two weeks? is that what it is on the on the galaxy store? tomas joscak 13 19 yes, yes, two-week periods tony morelan 13 21 and this is where you provide a graphic of a banner it's basically an advertisement that appears that helps drive users to your to your store and i know speaking from my experience of banner promotions are huge so great way to get your name out there and drive up your sales so one thing unique about your business is your quality of your photographs and your videos tell me a little bit about that do you have some experience? are you hiring an outside photographer to come in and do that or is this something that you're actually doing yourself? tomas joscak 13 55 and my short fuck us character i was happy to be a photographer as well for a few months before so i have pretty nice lenses and some good technique from that time so i just use the good quality stuff i have already and maybe the pictures are now good or we are we are happy able to quality however, i started just to be in the front of a window and making my first video with a smartphone only so all of this you can actually see it our youtube channels where we delete the old videos where the quality is so poor however, to have a visit video presentation seems to be really important at every watch face so 99% of all our watch faces do have a promo video tony morelan 14 48 okay, and it's you can always spot a vienna studios watch face video because of the white gloves that's something unique i always see these white gloves you know, holding the watch very elegantly are you? are those your hands inside the gloves? or do you have a professional model that you're bringing in to wear the white gloves tomas joscak 15 10 these are my hands the big advantage of making these videos was that before as i work from home, i prepared a small mini photo studio close to my computer so after which phase was ready, i just turn my position into this photo studio beside me and making a video really in a short time in the best possible quality and then i sell off the first two videos that at this magnificent because the watches are so small, have different displacements or some few nice places of my fingers have been there in a really big screen so i started to use goals and find now so i don't need to care about my nails quality anymore? tony morelan 16 01 got it so you don't have to hire a professional hand model that you don't have to worry about getting a little dirt under your fingernails because you just put on the nice fancy gloves love that tomas joscak 16 12 that's the point i think customers like it too tony morelan 16 15 sure, sure so how many watch faces have you published to date? tomas joscak 16 21 published maybe together it will be more than 700 wow, think about this number the three years? yes i think the 700 are solely on galaxy store so like count also my former watch faces it would be somewhere around 1000 and more watch faces tony morelan 16 40 i do understand though, that they're not all available that you actually utilize what you're calling a pop-up brand, which is where it's just for a limited time this watch faces available which kind of helps drive up you know the uniqueness behind the watch face which increases the value so tell me a little bit about your approach on offering a limited release, watch face tomas joscak 17 00 okay, we are playing with different business models and this was one of those we created a brand out there limited, which is a lot more available and to store it delimitation was only 30 days during this time we sold a nice amount of this ultra-limited brand so we'll prepare something for the future as well tony morelan 17 26 excellent no, that's it's a great a great approach again, showing off your marketing experience to help drive your sales so tell me where do you get your ideas from your watch faces tomas joscak 17 39 it's hard to say i'm just walking through the streets or driving and has the hardest time when i got some ideas under the shower tony morelan 17 51 so in the shower, tomas joscak 17 53 in my shower tony morelan 17 54 yeah, typically people are singing in the shower but you're actually designing watch faces in the shower tomas joscak 18 00 well i'm singing to, and then i find myself as i'm running to the corridors our white paper and putting ideas on it and then i can dry myself and doing other stuff tony morelan 18 14 that's good it's great yeah, you're already on the paper so is your approach into first sketch? or do you start designing your watch face straight on the computer? tomas joscak 18 23 yes, i'm sketching a lot i have much more ideas let's say it's time to make a real product out of it tony morelan 18 32 okay tell me a little bit about the tools that you're using so what software using like adobe photoshop adobe illustrator? what are you using to create and design your watch faces? tomas joscak 18 42 well 95% of all my vote faces are created in powerpoint tony morelan 18 51 powerpoint yes, the microsoft program for doing slideshows you're using that to create your watch faces? tomas joscak 19 01 yes, yes, definitely a lot of designers surprised whenever when i mentioned this, however i am is a really powerful instrument of powerpoint tony morelan 19 12 that's crazy i mean, i've used a lot of powerpoint, you know, in my years in fact, i often tell new designers, if they're looking to start a career in freelance graphic design, they really need to learn powerpoint, because people typically don't like using powerpoint, you know, when it comes to putting presentations together and if you can become, you know, a master of powerpoint, well, there's a lot of work out there because people just hate using powerpoint so to hear that you're using powerpoint to create the graphics on these luxury watch faces is just mind blowing i mean that that is absolutely amazing that you have figured out a way to use powerpoint at that level so that's excellent so tell me to date i think i read somewhere that you have over 1 million downloads, is that correct? tomas joscak 20 04 oh, well done 1 million, i think tony morelan 20 10 no, actually at the moment we have more than 5 million downloads 5 million wow that is just amazing so congrats on that tell me a little bit about leveraging free watch faces i know that a lot of designers they'll offer some of their watch faces for free but then the others are paid give me your idea on utilizing free watch faces to help raise your brand level tomas joscak 20 44 free workspaces are great however we are using it very rarely maybe there's one or two per brand and in our stores where we are offering luxury, luxury watch faces which we did $100 plus, we don't use any of those free watch faces so my recommendation would be it's a nice to have some, but not a lot tony morelan 21 11 got it? yeah and i agree with that because you want to really drive your sales so, you know, utilizing free watch faces to help raise brand awareness is excellent but don't over saturate the market with free watch faces so yeah, totally agree with you with that having been a designer now for watch faces for three years and millions of downloads i'm sure you've come across a few challenges so share a little bit about some of the challenges maybe that you've had to face tomas joscak 21 39 well, at the moment, i cannot remember any issue according to brands selling points or design, however, are big challenges right now, according to the coronavirus i spoke to other designers and currently we are the most hated at this crisis at the moment so our sales go to really down in everyone met this year and what we saw was that actually the elect luxury segment a lot of watch faces was actually stopped selling in this time really? tony morelan 22 17 yeah and that's not surprising considering all the you know, our world is going through right now that can understand where people are wanting to you know, watch where they're spending their money so hopefully that will change in a soon enough time so tell me are there any features you would like to see added to the galaxy store or to galaxy watch studio? tomas joscak 22 38 well, i'm personally very adaptive person so i, i am working, whatever is on the table, i try to squeeze the most possible out of it and i asked myself, what can i change to be successful at the market or with the two which is provided to us so basically, i could have some issues but i'm focusing on the on the market right now and on the on the revenues we are able to produce tony morelan 23 12 okay okay so tell me what is in the future for vienna studios do you have any, you know, any updates? what's your plan for the future? tomas joscak 23 23 we will definitely launch some new limited additions to the code successful pilot project we ran before and we have a plan to make a really, really very realistic digital watch face version of a real mechanical watch i cannot tell you any more to this project we are right now speaking to possible licensing partner, but these will be i think, very original offer at the galaxy store tony morelan 23 57 awesome super excited to see that when it actually becomes available so can you talk a little bit about multi language support and how you're utilizing that feature on the galaxy store to help market your watch faces globally tomas joscak 24 11 in the galaxy store, we are starting always with only english version of our watch faces however, if this one particular watch face is popular in other countries, so afterwards, we are translating all the descriptions and promo pictures into the language where the sales are growing tony morelan 24 31 okay, so just to just to help new designers understand, when you first publish a watch face, you publish it in english, that's the preferred language but seller office allows you to create alternative pages that you can put in the native language for different countries so that if a user from that country is viewing your seller office page, they'll see it in their native language it's great to see that you're united in the future, and it's a nice approach when you're just looking at you know, if you've got increased sales in those different regions that it's worthwhile to then translate it so who's doing the translation? tomas joscak 25 10 basically, we are using automatic translations, okay and for example, german language is familiar with me so i look at the languages where we are in and rest is automatic at the moment tony morelan 25 24 okay, nice so i also understand that you're doing something that you're calling an outlet store so tell me a little bit about your outlet store and how you're utilizing watch face watch faces on that tomas joscak 25 36 outlet store is a really another success story of vienna studios as we started promoting and selling, high priced looks at a watch faces there was a lot of people who would like to have one but i don't want to pay as much are cannot afford for these high prices so afterwards we have a certain amount of dyslexia watch faces, we decided to put the oldest one into a new creative outlet store with a huge discount so at the moment the people are able to buy alexa watch faces even for much lower prices in the outlet store tony morelan 26 23 that's a great approach it's the first that i've actually heard of someone using that approach to sell some of their older watch faces so very interesting i love that so i'm guessing you're familiar with some of the other top watch face designers out there on the galaxy star can you tell me you know, give me some names who are the designers that you that you are impressed with that you follow with the names that kind of jump out for you? tomas joscak 26 48 okay, there is a lot of great designers out there i can i could mention a few x9 studios, infinity watch faces however, the best one for myself and now level four for himself is matteo dini a few of his watch faces, and he could claim be like designing every pixel so i'm really impressed by work of matteo tony morelan 27 18 yeah, he is he's an amazing designer based out of italy you know, one of our top watch face designers i think a lot of people are impressed with what matteo dini has done some of the other names that you had mentioned x nine i actually am doing a live chat with john from x nine studio tomorrow so we're going to be doing a live chat and i'll be talking to him about theme designing and watch faces signing he's also another past winter with the galaxy store awards let's say you had mentioned infinity watch faces that's chris shomo he's an excellent designer he's actually the one who i first discovered when i learned about galaxy watch designer at the time, which is now galaxy watch studio so, you know when i first learned about chris and what he was doing with galaxy watch, and let's see, you mentioned your rarity oh urarity yeah, he's got just amazing designs and if you have a chance to look at his videos, the work that he does with his videos is just outstanding is definitely someone that can inspire a lot of people tomas joscak 28 25 yes, uratity tony morelan 28 27 yet another guy? yeah so bergen is great he's an excellent designer again, one of the designers that has been there for a while, who does some very nice realistic watch faces so definitely some designers to go in and look for when you're looking to get inspired for creating watch faces so i have one more question for you when you're not designing watch faces what do you like to do for fun? tomas joscak 28 50 oh, fine and except designing watch faces, which is really relaxed for myself if i am looking for fans my buddy, i love to visiting sauna tony morelan 29 02 oh, asana yeah oh, nice that's a good time to relax good time to relax now, i also heard that you are the father of twin four-year olds is that correct? yes, correct good i'm sure you're looking for a lot of time to relax i can only anticipate that that would be a little crazy at times tomas joscak 29 23 now, and they have been my twins have been at the beginning of my business, actually, because i couldn't work only during day slept so we started to get actually tony morelan 29 33 oh, nice nice nice wonderful okay, tomas i absolutely appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me and record this podcast, tons of fun lots of great inspiration so keep up the great work and i'm looking forward to seeing what vienna studios puts out in the near future so thanks tomas joscak 29 48 thank you thanks outro 29 50 looking to start creating for samsung? download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e07-tomas-joscak.html

Develop Galaxy Watch for Tizen

doc

Web Widget

create your first tizen wearable web widget application welcome to tizen wearable web widget application development! note widget template is not supported since tizen studio 3 0 a wearable web application is basically a web site stored on a wearable device you can create it using web-native languages, such as html5, css, and javascript a widget application is one of the tizen application types it can be shown by specific ui applications such as the home screen and lock screen that can contain widget applications figure widget application on a wearable device study the following instructions to help familiarize yourself with the tizen web application development process as well as using the tizen studio and installing the created application on the emulator or target device with the instructions, you can create and run a basic wearable web widget application a web widget , which displays some text on the screen with no user interaction before you get started with developing tizen applications, download and install the tizen studio for more information on the installation process, see the installation guide create a wearable web widget project using the tizen studio this step shows how you can use a predesigned project template that creates all the basic files and folders required for your project build the application after you have implemented code for the features you want, this step shows how you can build the application to validate and compile the code run the application this step shows how you can run the application on the emulator or a real target device design a ui this step shows how you can create the application ui and make small alterations to it to improve the usability of your application when you are developing a more complex application, you can take advantage of the web tools included in the tizen studio to ease the tasks of creating functionality and designing the application ui creating a project the following example shows you how to create and configure a basic wearable web widget application project in the tizen studio an application project contains all the files that make up an application note standalone widget application packages are not allowed in the tizen store for user convenience, you can use a standalone widget application for testing purposes in the tizen studio if you want to publish the application in the tizen store, combine it with at least 1 ui application in the same package for more information, see developing multiple projects as a combined package the following figure illustrates the application to be created the application screen displays the hello widget text and no user interaction is provided figure wearable web widget application to create the application project launch the tizen studio in the tizen studio menu, select file > new > tizen project the project wizard opens in the project wizard, define the project details the project wizard is used to create the basic application skeleton with the required folder structure and mandatory files you can easily create different applications by selecting an applicable template or sample for the project wizard to use select the template project type and click next select the profile wearable and version from a drop-down list and click next the version depends on the platform version you have installed and with which you are developing the application select the web application application type and click next select the widget template and click next define the project properties and click finish you can enter the project name 3-50 characters and the unique package id you can also select the location and working sets by clicking more properties the project wizard sets up the project, creates the application files using the default content from the template, and closes for more information on the project wizard and the available templates, see creating tizen projects with tizen project wizard you can see the created project in the project explorer view the most important files and folders include css folder for css files used by the application to style its content js folder for javascript files used by the application to implement its functional logic config xml application configuration file used by the platform to install and launch the application icon png application icon file used by the platform to represent the widget index html main html file for the layout of the application screen preview png preview of the widget application file that is displayed in the widget view on the target figure application in the project explorer note you can validate your widget and view and modify the application configuration in the web application configuration editor in this example, no configuration changes are required your application project is now ready for further actions next, build the application checking the application with the api validator you can validate a tizen wearable widget application using one of 3 validators html validator css validator js validator you can enable or disable these validators in the application preferences go to window > preferences > tizen studio > webwidget, and check the applicable check boxes figure validation preferences the validation is performed automatically when the project or package is built, or when the application is run when the validation is complete, its results are shown in the problems view if the view is not displayed, select it from window > show view > problems keyboard shortcut shift + alt + q + x figure validation results managing the application configuration to view and modify the application configuration in the project explorer view, double-click the config xml file of the application the tizen studio opens the file in the web application configuration editor in the configuration editor, view and modify the configuration details using the various tabs overview define general information, such as the name and icon of the application features define required software and hardware features this information is used for application filtering in the tizen store privileges define the security-sensitive apis or api groups accessed and used by the application localization define localized values for the application name, description, and license policy request network resource permissions to access external network resources preferences define name-value pairs that can be set or retrieved through the application tizen edit the tizen schema extension properties of the application source view and edit the source code of the config xml file changes made and saved on the other tabs are reflected in the source code and vice versa note the config xml file must conform to both the xml file format and the w3c specification requirements editing the file in the source tab is intended for advanced users only to save any changes, in the tizen studio menu, select file > save all for more information on configuring the application, see setting the web application configuration understanding the source code pay attention to the following main issues in the application source code, to understand how the application is designed and how it works for source code details related to the ui, see designing a simple ui the widget application settings are defined in the config xml file the file includes various information for the widget application the following code shows an example of the widget content in the file the <tizen app-widget> element indicates the widget settings the widget application is started and initialized with the index html file the <content> field src attribute defines the starting point if the widget requires privileges, add them to the config xml file as well <?xml version="1 0" encoding="utf-8"?> <widget xmlns tizen="http //tizen org/ns/widgets" xmlns="http //www w3 org/ns/widgets" id="http //yourdomain/widget" version="1 0 0"> <tizen app-widget id="0lvphbx9t6 widget widget" primary="true"> <tizen widget-label>hello web widget!</tizen widget-label> <tizen widget-content src="widget/widget/index html"> <tizen widget-size preview="widget/widget/preview png">2x2</tizen widget-size> </tizen widget-content> </tizen app-widget> <tizen application id="0lvphbx9t6 widget" package="0lvphbx9t6" required_version="4 0"/> <content src="index html"/> <feature name="http //tizen org/feature/screen size normal"/> <icon src="icon png"/> <name>widget</name> <tizen profile name="wearable"/> </widget> the widget application consists of the following folder architecture widget widget css style css js main js index html preview png config xml icon png index html you can customize the widget/widget/index html, widget/widget/css/style css, and widget/widget/js/main js files you can add various features such as asynchronous functions, js library, and effects to the widget application using js for example, if a js-based animation effect is needed, add the requestanimationframe method or some other animation library to the js file similarly, to change the ui elements' visual looks or add css-based effects including animation , modify the css file you can define the widget as a standalone or combined web application + web widget application the widget application can be a standalone application, which means that it does not connect to a web application, or it can be combined in the same package with a web ui application however, you cannot publish a standalone widget in the tizen store when you create a widget application in the tizen studio, it is always first a standalone application if you want to connect to a web ui application, you can package the widget with a web ui application create a web ui application and the widget application in the project explorer view, right-click the web application, and select properties > tizen studio > package > multi, and select the widget to be included in the package click ok in the following figure, the widget widget application is packaged with the app ui application the widget widget application indicates this with the [with app] text building your application after you have created the application project, you can implement the required features in this example, only the default features from the project template are used, and no code changes are required when your application code is ready, you must build the application the building process performs a validation check and compiles your javascript and css files you can build the application in the following ways automatically the automatic build means that the tizen studio automatically rebuilds the application whenever you change a source or resource file and save the application project to use the automatic build select the project in the project explorer view in the tizen studio menu, select project > build automatically a check mark appears next to the menu option you can toggle the automatic build on and off by reselecting project > build automatically manually the manual build means that you determine yourself when the application is built to manually build the application, right-click the project in the project explorer view and select build project figure manually building the application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following in the tizen studio menu, select project > build project press the f10 key after you have built the application, run it running your application you can run the web widget application on the emulator or a real target device note since the web simulator does not support a circular ui, this topic does not cover the instructions for running the application on the web simulator running on the emulator to run the application on the emulator launch an emulator instance in the emulator manager in the tizen studio menu, select tools > emulator manager in the emulator manager, select a wearable emulator from the list and click launch if no applicable emulator instance exists, create a new one the emulator is launched in its own window you can also see the new emulator instance and its folder structure in the device manager generate a security profile before you run the application, you must sign your application package with a certificate profile in the tizen studio run the application in the project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > tizen web application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following press the ctrl + f11 key click the run icon in the toolbar if you have created multiple emulator instances, select the instance you want from the combo box in the toolbar before selecting to run the application if you select an offline emulator, it is automatically launched when you select to run the application confirm that the application launches on the emulator note if the emulator display has switched off, you cannot see the application launch to switch the display on, click the power key in the lower-right corner of the emulator the above screen is shown through the viewer, to allow you to develop a lone widget application for testing purposes to see the widget running on the home screen, add the widget there 1 press the **back** key in the upper-right corner of the emulator device to return to the home screen showing a watch face 2 swipe the home screen right until you see **+ add widget** select it 3 swipe right until you see your widget application select it ![adding to home screen] https //docs tizen org/application/web/get-started/wearable-widget/media/widget_run_add_home_ww png you can see the added widget on the home screen to access the widget from the home screen, swipe right ![home screen widget] https //docs tizen org/application/web/get-started/wearable-widget/media/widget_app_wearable_widget png while the application is running, the **log** view in the tizen studio shows the log, debug, and exception messages from the methods defined in the log macros to see the view, in the tizen studio menu, go to **window \> show view \> log** for more information on using the emulator features, see using emulator control keys, menu, and panel and using extended emulator features running on a target device to run the application on a target device connect the wearable target device to your computer define settings on the device go to settings > connections, and switch on wi-fi the device and the computer must be connected to the same wi-fi network note the ip address the device is using go to settings > gear info, and switch on the debugging mode in the terminal, enter the following commands cd tizen-studio/tools /sdb connect <ip address of galaxy watch> use the ip address you noted before instead of the terminal, you can also use the remote device manager for the connection in the first attempt, the connection fails and the device asks for user confirmation to allow galaxy watch to read log data, copy files to and from your computer, and install the application manually, click the accept mark in the device manager, confirm that the device is connected shown in the device list generate an author certificate before you run the application, you must sign your application package with a certificate profile in the tizen studio run the application in the device manager, select the device in project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > tizen web application alternatively, you can also select the project in the project explorer view and do one of the following press the ctrl + f11 key click the run icon in the toolbar if you have both a connected device and existing emulator instances, select the device from the combo box in the toolbar before selecting to run the application confirm that the application launches on the target device like with the emulator, you can add the widget to the home screen to easily access it note the application is launched using the default debug run configuration to create and use another configuration in the project explorer view, right-click the project and select run as > run configurations in the run configurations window, click the new launch configuration icon , define the configuration details, and launch the application by clicking run designing a simple ui the widget application created with the widget template has a simple user interface with a text component showing the hello widget text on the screen the ui is created using w3c/html in the index html file the w3c specifications provide html and css features for creating a user interface with html, you can define the structure of the application screens, while css allows you to define the look and feel of the screens figure user interface in the widget template creating the basic ui the ui in the widget template uses the html dom, which is a structured model to control web elements it is an official w3c standard to express the document regardless of platforms or languages, and the foundation of the html5 apis the template contains the following components the <html> element is the top-level element of the html dom tree that wraps the entire document, and it has the <head> and <body> elements as child nodes <!doctype html> <html> <head>  </head> <body>  </body> </html> the <head> element contains the information that the browser refers to when rendering the body element to interpret information, such as the title of the html document, and the location of the related css and javascript files <meta> defines information, such as encoding, creator, and keywords of the document <style>, <link> sets the styles of the document <script>, <noscript> adds functions to the document <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style css"/> <script src="js/main js"></script> <style></style> </head> the <body> element defines the area displaying content on the browser screen in this case, it defines the hello widget text component <body> <div id="page"> <div id="container"> <p id="content-text">hello widget</p> </div> </div> </body> modifying existing components with css css cascading style sheets specifies the layout and styling of the web application there are various ways to connect css with html style attribute in an html element <link> element in the <head> element @import attribute in the css area <style> element in the <head> element applying the style of an html element directly with the style attribute has the highest priority on the other hand, creating a separate css file and managing it separately is convenient when it comes to applying changes in the future in the widget template, the css file is connected to the html file using a <link> element in the <head> element <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style css"/> <script src="js/main js"></script> <style></style> </head> the following lines in the css code describe the styling of the text in an element with the content-text id css/style css html, body { width 100%; height 100%; margin 0; padding 0; } #page { background-color #000; color #fff; height 100%; position relative; width 100%; } #container { width 100%; height 100%; } #content-text { font-weight bold; font-size 40px; width 100%; height 100%; line-height 360px; margin 0; text-align center; } index html <body> <div id="page"> <div id="container"> <p id="content-text">hello widget</p> </div> </div> </body> by default, the text uses the #fff color white , defined for the <div> element with the page id if you change the css code and add a separate color for the content-text id, the text color changes in this case, to #ff0000 red #content-text { font-weight bold; font-size 40px; width 100%; height 100%; line-height 360px; margin 0; text-align center; color #ff0000; } figure screen with a new text color

https://developer.samsung.com/galaxy-watch-tizen/creating-your-first-app/web-widget.html

Learn Developers Podcast

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Episode 2, Derrick Lee

season 3, episode 2 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest derrick lee, polycube galaxy themes, galaxy store not only do we chat about their approach to designing and marketing compelling themes, but also how polycube is looking to expand their use of contract designers from their home country of korea to include designers from all around the world so that they can create for a global audience listen download this episode topics covered history of polycube best of galaxy store awards publishing on galaxy store galaxy badge use of stock imagery design workflow diversity and inclusion helpful links polycube facebook - facebook com/friends polycube polycube website - polycube co kr/v2/ polycube instagram - instagram com/polycube_friends/ polycube youtube - youtube com/c/polycubeinc galaxy themes - developer samsung com/galaxy-themes samsung developer program homepage - developer samsung com samsung developer program newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developer program news - developer samsung com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers tony morelan linkedin - linkedin com/in/tony-morelan transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode two on today's show, i'm joined by derrick lee, content manager at polycube winners of the 2021 best of galaxy store award for best steam collection not only do we chat about their approach to designing and marketing, amazing themes, but also how polycube is looking to expand their use of contract designers from their home country of korea to include designers from all around the world so that they can create for a global audience enjoy hey, derrick, it is great to have you on the podcast derrick lee 00 51 hello, tony it's, it's great to see you thank you for having me tony morelan 00 55 so i like to start the podcast with who is derrick lee? derrick lee 00 59 um, well, i'm a person who appreciates and enjoys all forms of art, like paintings, digital graphics, music, everything i actually majored in industrial designing myself and i also love singing you know, as i said, all forms of art, tony morelan 01 13 i had no idea that you had a big appreciation for, for art and for music i actually do myself derrick lee 01 19 well, i see a guitar i see several guitars behind it right now yeah tony morelan 01 23 and the folks listening to this it's only for their audio but yes, we've got some cameras, derrick can see i've got a few guitars in the background i like to pretend that i know how to sing but still have yet to get the courage to actually sing in front of somebody so yeah, great to hear that you have that appreciation in that ability yeah, derrick lee 01 41 i'm not that good at singing either i just love it tony morelan 01 42 that's awesome that's awesome so derrick, you are a content manager at polycube tell me a little bit about that role derrick lee 01 50 well, that role is essentially giving out guidelines for designers coming up with something good visually, i think it could be better if somebody is giving out guidelines on which designs can you know resonate with people a little bit more, not just with themselves that's my role at polycube tony morelan 02 05 my background is really in graphic design okay, that's where i spent much of my career and i've worked with many art directors so it sounds like even though you call yourself a content manager to me, it sounds like that role really fits that art director derrick lee 02 20 role yeah, well, anyway, you can call it yeah tony morelan 02 24 so how long have you been at polycube? derrick lee 02 26 um, i have been at polycube for about three years now tony morelan 02 29 just about the same amount of time that i've been at samsung oh, okay so you had said that you that you majored in industrial design interesting i actually minored in industrial design okay okay, so we've got a few similarities, not just in music and singing but also with industrial design yes, we do i understand that coming out of college, you didn't just dive right into tech that you actually were selling donuts from a truck? derrick lee 02 57 yeah, i have been selling donuts for about, i think about 18 months and i really enjoyed it you know, don't get me wrong i didn't quit doing that, because i didn't like it but i really wanted to be involved in a design business in any way, shape, or form sure that's something i wanted to do more and i figured out that, you know, polycube was a company that was designing themes, and i thought it could be exciting so i jumped in that's great tony morelan 03 21 so now polycube is from seoul correct that's where your headquarters is? yes and that's where i'm assuming that's where you live? derrick lee 03 28 yeah, i live like 20 minutes away and it's a beautiful city, i hope in the future when there are no barriers such as covid-19 i hope our supporters all around the world can visit for a nice trip tony morelan 03 39 so you're in seoul, korea, but your english sounds so good i can tell you must have spent some time in the in the states here well, derrick lee 03 47 when i was five years old, my dad got a job in the states in new orleans, actually and we lived there for about nine years wow and then even after i came back to korea, i you know, i stayed in korea for a year and then in new orleans for a year and i've been going back and forth but in korea, military surfaces mandatory i stayed here for two years and then i started selling donuts as i mentioned earlier, so yeah, it's been a while and now covid yeah, so i've been staying in korea for a while but yeah, i do miss new orleans tony morelan 04 18 so i'm guessing that your love for music probably came a bit out of your time in new orleans derrick lee 04 24 oh, yeah, definitely i love jazz i love you know, stevie wonder cars, though those were the those were the artists that really, you know, you know, set a fire inside me yeah tony morelan 04 35 oh, that's great that's great now i was fortunate that actually a few months before covid hit i actually went out to seoul korea because that is where samsung's headquarter this so i got to spend a week there absolutely beautiful city so much to explore, but boy do i want to get back there was a lot that i did not see derrick lee 04 54 i would like to be your guide if you happen to come again one day yeah, tony morelan 04 58 i'll take you up on it for sure so, so about polycube, the company itself, they've been around for quite a while and i know that they do much more than just theme so tell me a bit about the history of poly q? and what are some of those areas that they also work on? derrick lee 05 12 you know, we have quite a history and actually 2021 was our 20th anniversary wow, we came a long way developing apps, making games and designing themes, watch faces and whatnot yeah, tony morelan 05 24 in the name polycube, i'm wondering, is there an interesting story behind that name? derrick lee 05 29 um, well, our founder wanted a name that emphasizes the importance of diversity in a group and if you look at the etymology of poly, you know, it means many sided sure so our founder thought that it was a perfect name cube was added, because, you know, if you look at the cube the shape and as it also has many sides, you know, you have to have many sides to form a cube, right so that's how poly and cube got together and formed the named polycube, you had mentioned that you do more than just themes well, we also make a lot of games, you know, one that we're really working on these days is a game called poker master it has been around, but we're trying to, you know, find rooms for improvement sure tony morelan 06 06 to update the game so that more people can enjoy it now, is that game on the galaxy store at the moment? yes, it derrick lee 06 13 is excellent and we're, we're trying to make it better and better, and has been around for a while, but we're trying to improve it all the time sure and we also design themes and watch faces, we're really trying to improve our watch face designs these days so i hope you know it will get bigger and bigger tony morelan 06 29 yeah, i was checking out some of your designs earlier i love the very classic feel of many of your designs derrick lee 06 35 that means a lot coming from you because you're a designer yourself tony morelan 06 39 thank you thank you that's actually how i got my start with samsung for those that don't know how, okay, when i was doing my graphic design gig started designing watch faces selling them on the galaxy store okay, got noticed by a few people at samsung made a few phone calls and before you know it, i was working for samsung teaching how to design watch faces, derrick lee 06 59 then that really means a lot coming from you tony morelan 07 03 polycube, i think it's you said it's about 30 employees derrick lee 07 07 well, 31 exactly and we have 11 designers among those 31 employees okay, tony morelan 07 13 now, are these split between full time employees? and are some contractors, you have derrick lee 07 18 full time employees and contractors altogether? 31 okay, and all of our 11 designers are all full, they work full time tony morelan 07 26 wow okay, that's great so, you know, i know a lot of designers and developers listen to this podcast always looking for opportunities to, you know, look for new work okay, by any chance is polycube looking for new designers, derrick lee 07 39 we are actually planning on recruiting a lot of designers from abroad sure, starting this year, because we want diversity in our group i guess the best way is you can look us up because we have a website but also, you can send an email, the email addresses master at polycube co kr okay and if you send an email anytime we will take a close look at it and yeah, we'll pay attention tony morelan 08 04 that's awesome so what is the web address for polycube? derrick lee 08 07 oh, it's very simple it's www dot polycube co kr got it and that's p o l y c u b e very simple tony morelan 08 16 how long would you say polycube has been designing themes? derrick lee 08 19 paula cube has been designing themes for about six years now because we started on 2016 tony morelan 08 26 so six years, i would guess that you were probably one of the first theme designers to get onto the platform so how did the people that polycube first learn about the opportunity to design themes for samsung and sell them on the galaxy store? derrick lee 08 39 you know, we were just normal galaxy phone users at first and you know, we naturally just got to know about themes on our phones, because we were using our phones, obviously and we kind of had some time to sit down together and talk about it because we thought we could really jump into and make a business out of it tony morelan 08 57 yeah, you know, it's funny, every designer that i have interviewed on the podcast, has said the same story that they were first just a user and you know, saw the opportunity to customize their own phone and they thought well heck, i could do this myself so what about some of the other areas of theme designing? are you guys also selling you know, wallpapers, aods, icon packs, things like that? derrick lee 09 17 yes everything you just you just said right now we do sell wallpapers, icon packs yeah, aods tony morelan 09 25 so last year, we had the 2021 best of galaxy store award show and polycube was the recipient of the best theme collection award yes, we were tell me what that meant to you and your company for winning that award? well, first derrick lee 09 42 of all, of course, we are very grateful for the awards and this award is to us is something that really started such a positive momentum for us because ever since we got the news that we were winning the award, we are feeling you know, we actually feel a positive momentum that started from that board so it's something that started such a positive momentum for us tony morelan 10 03 that's great yeah and you're a truthfully your collection is amazing i do sit on the board of the folks here at samsung, they get to vote on the winners yeah, i was very happy to see you win the well-deserved award for best thing collection oh, in what ways? have you promoted winning the award? derrick lee 10 21 through, you know, the mainstream social media such as youtube, facebook, instagram? yeah, we're everywhere tony morelan 10 27 are you using galaxy store badges to help promote what you do at polycube? derrick lee 10 32 we are always looking for chances to utilize our galaxy badge everywhere we can use it because it's a good system, you know, the galaxy badge, all you have to do is just click on it and then you can take a look at our you know, collection of themes tony morelan 10 43 sure and when it comes to discoverability, what are some of the platform some of the techniques that you guys do, just to help people find polycube out there in the in the world? derrick lee 10 52 we have, we do have links that lead to our facebook and instagram page and all of the descriptions and the themes that we publish tony morelan 10 59 so you had mentioned youtube, and i know that that is one of the best tools that designers are using to help promote their work so i'm assuming then you guys are creating videos derrick lee 11 09 yeah, we are creating videos i don't have the exact number with me right now but i think we have more than 4000 videos tony morelan 11 16 that's great and then you're leveraging those videos also on platforms like instagram yes, we are now you had mentioned facebook, tell me what is the best way for people to find your facebook page? derrick lee 11 26 well, it's www facebook com/friends poly cube tony morelan 11 32 yeah, that's easy i love that polycube friends thank you you know, when i started my company for doing themes and watch faces, i added the word buzz to the end so you could find my instagram axeirbuzz derrick lee 11 44 buzz? buzz? okay, that's a positive vibe to it tony morelan 11 47 so polycube friends, is that pretty much the handle that you'll use across other platforms? so like on instagram? yes, it is yes now you had mentioned 4000 videos, but i know you guys have a lot more when it comes to themes what would you say? your total theme count is right now, derrick lee 12 01 in total, we published 6387 themes tony morelan 12 05 that's crazy what would you say are the total downloads that you have on those 6000 themes? derrick lee 12 10 about 25 million? tony morelan 12 13 that's crazy i was excited when i got to my first million downloads i'm a long ways away from 25 it's very humbling when we think about it with that many themes, i'm sure that you're starting to look at different topics, different areas so you can see really what is resonating with the with the customer base? what are some of those categories that you would say your themes fall under? derrick lee 12 34 um, we're always looking for diversity in our designs, but there are some categories that really resonate with people more than others for example, design skulls, and butterflies and flowers i think those are, you know, some themes that really resonate with people a lot, you know, regardless of country, regardless of gender tony morelan 12 54 yeah, i noticed i saw one of your themes was school, but it was a steampunk school and i love steampunk i love that look derrick lee 13 02 oh, yeah, i think i know which one you're talking about tony morelan 13 05 yeah, that's, that's a great theme so outside of some of those areas, seasonal wise i mean, do you see like, importance to design themes related to holidays or two seasons? derrick lee 13 15 oh, definitely is especially christmas and halloween i think those are two holidays that really, i'm sure really boost the market, if you will i wish there were more designs on like mardi gras since i'm from new orleans yeah, but halloween and christmas are you know, the two holidays? tony morelan 13 32 yeah, i've heard that from many other folks as well great times to be stylizing your phone for sure derrick lee 13 38 yes, yes, it is tony morelan 13 41 so you know polycube, had a lot of success and you know, it's obviously this wasn't overnight, because you've been doing it for a while but tell me was there like one sort of pivotal moment in your history that you were like, oh, my gosh, this really is starting to take off? or was it truthfully, just a gradual growth that you've done over the years? derrick lee 13 57 it was gradual, to a certain extent but when we first started to actually design themes and tried to make a business out of it, the first six months, i don't think we weren't getting a lot of downloads to downloads that we were expecting and, you know, the support that we were expecting, i mean, of course, we had some, you know, very good supporters that, you know, kept us kept us going when we weren't getting the results that we wanted but after six months, we were seeing the growth when it comes to numbers when it comes to you know, this porters and things like that tony morelan 14 29 yeah, i know and speaking with a lot of other designers, i mean, it takes an investment and time before you start to see really any in any bit of return some of that comes to just getting your name out there and it's not just publishing your themes, your watch faces on galaxy store, but it's that additional marketing that you do so, you know, once you put some time into your instagram or into your facebook page yes that's when you start to see the return yes, definitely so you've got a lot of designers on hand yes where are they? designers getting their ideas derrick lee 15 02 first, our designers, you know, just come up with literally a sketch on their notebooks with their pens but also, where we get ideas is from the reviews, ah, our supporters all around the world, they are not just helping by supporting, they are actually really helping out through reviews, because when we read them, they really offer some great ideas and insights tony morelan 15 20 got it so when people are posting comments after they've purchased one of your themes, you guys are really looking at those comments to think like, okay, what could we either, you know, expand on this topic? or maybe the comment is, and this one isn't really for me, and then maybe your team, you'll start to look in other areas? derrick lee 15 35 yeah, well, you know, sometimes the reviews are very specific it's not just i like it, why i don't like it there are a lot of reviews that say, i don't like it, but i would like it if it was this, if it was that those are the reviews that really give us really good ideas that's great tony morelan 15 50 to hear so a lot of companies leverage stock photography, when it comes to creating their designs, yes which i know can kind of be a hot topic, because truthfully, you know, there's licensing that that gets involved whenever you're using stock imagery and also the reality that that anybody can go and, you know, purchase a certain stock image and build a theme out of it but what are you guys doing to help set yourself apart when you are leveraging stock imagery, derrick lee 16 18 of course, there are a lot of good sources out there that can be utilized and be modified, integrate themes but as you just said, there are some, some issues when it comes to just, you know, using those stock imagery and turning them into themes, right so we have a whole team that really looks into the licensing parts to prevent any legal issues, if you will and we have designers that really keep that in mind that you just don't take the stock imagery, and just copy that and just put it in your phone and that doesn't really make a theme, you know, we go through plenty modifying and we add ideas to it and, you know, all of a sudden, it's not just that stock imagery, it's something totally different tony morelan 16 57 that's great i've actually spoken with many other theme designers on the podcast, and they've all said the same thing that, you know, they leverage the use of stock imagery, but they take those images and build them into an image that is their own that is something that is unique yes, yes so you had mentioned pencil sketching, so tell me what the workflow is i mean, do you are your designers actually traditionally grabbing pencil and paper and, and starting to sketch some of their concepts? derrick lee 17 23 yeah, it's 2022 but that's, that's still where it starts, you know, first, you know, they literally come up with a sketch with a pen or a pencil and then we actually have a meeting, we look at all those sketches, and we discuss which ones we will actually go for yeah, once the designs materialize, we sit down again, and discuss whether there's room for improvement, or revising and then after that, we publish them in hope that our supporters enjoy them tony morelan 17 48 that is excellent to hear you know, in my experience, as a designer, i would often tell other designers that yes, that is the first step is to grab pencil and paper because you don't get caught up in all the tools that you know, software allows you to do or limits you to do you don't get caught up in colors or specific, you know, shapes that may be in the way you truthfully see the skeleton of the design and if that skeleton works, then you know, it's something that's worth pursuing yeah, yeah great to hear that the that you guys take that approach to design? so you know, the process of starting with sketch and then going through meetings and developing the designs all the way to publishing? how long do you think that typically takes your team to do? derrick lee 18 31 um, from just a sketch on a notebook? to an actual theme? i would say one theme takes four days, maybe five? tony morelan 18 39 i would say that's a pretty quick, aggressive timeline sometimes it would take me weeks to do derrick lee 18 45 yeah, because we don't want you know, we don't want to keep our supporters waiting so sure you work hard tony morelan 18 50 what applications are you using when you are doing your design work? adobe derrick lee 18 55 photoshop, adobe illustrator and after effect, oh, tony morelan 18 58 so after effects for doing videos, okay yeah are you doing any animated like wallpapers where you're leveraging motion graphics? derrick lee 19 06 yeah, we actually have a whole there's a team that really focuses on only the video parts, okay, the animation parts that really help out if another team comes up with the sketch shirt and you know, the basis then, you know, there is another whole team designing team that really helps out with sophisticated designing when it comes to the videos tony morelan 19 25 okay, okay that's great so i know a lot of designers utilize the strategy of free when it comes to marketing, their apps so tell me about your experience well, what's your strategy when it comes to free themes free? watch faces? derrick lee 19 42 yeah, we are offering free themes every week, and we promote them every friday and i think our supporters deserve free themes you know, sure, every once in a while and you know, if you check out our facebook and instagram page, you'll see that there are actually quite a lot of opportunities to get some awesome themes for free yeah, tony morelan 19 59 i think that i think that that's great i know what i teach typically is that it's nice to offer up a free app a free design but you don't want to inundate the market with too many of your free yeah, themes free watch faces because then everyone's going to expect that there's always going to be some good free stuff out there so use it as a way to encourage the community to get to try out your stuff, your themes, and then that way, they're more inclined and more trustworthy to actually put money behind some of their purchases and buy some of your items, derrick lee 20 30 especially for people who never, you know, use the theme before, but you want them to really get to know what a theme is, you know, why theme is exciting to have a theme on your phone, tony morelan 20 40 let's talk about some of the challenges because i know you know; this whole market is not as easy as just creating something nice and posting it so what are some of the challenges that you face when it comes to designing themes and marketing those themes? derrick lee 20 55 we hope that our themes satisfy as many people as possible globally, because themes are global but sometimes figuring out how the taste like differs depending on cultures and countries, it's not it's not the easiest thing to do you know, we come up with one design, but people here like it, but people there don't we are greedy, if you will, in a positive way we want to satisfy as many people as possible globally so that's not so that would be a challenge tony morelan 21 21 of course yeah no, that is that is and i know that a lot of times designers are leveraging the ability to have localization for their app so this is where you know, you're selling the theme globally but you can say, you know, in the us market, this is what the description looks like in you know, a market in asia, this is what the description looks like or in germany yes, i know that, you know, designers do see a nice increase in revenue when they are utilizing localization so i'm assuming are you guys using that feature as derrick lee 21 49 well? yes, we are the descriptions look all different, depending on the country, the language, you had mentioned tony morelan 21 55 covid earlier? obviously, we still are in the middle of covid how has that impacted polycube, derrick lee 22 01 of course, covid-19 is very negative but for us, it has done nothing but booster motivation, because covid-19 stopped people from expressing themselves through their faces by making them wear masks right so sure, we were more motivated to help to help people express themselves on their phones instead, through well designed customized themes tony morelan 22 21 you know, that was nice to hear it's something i hadn't really thought about that yes, the face is being covered by your mask so how else can you express? you know, your look your style? yeah and that's where people are customizing their phones, obviously, to represent themselves? derrick lee 22 37 yeah, because nowadays, i think your phone is your second face, for sure it shows who you are tony morelan 22 42 so what is in the future for public cube, derrick lee 22 45 you know, we are actually planning to come up with some very innovative designs that have never been applied to themes before you know, if you look at themes, of course, there is diversity, you know, you can see all sorts of designs in the themes market but sometimes, you know, you run into some designs that make you think that oh, this is nice, but it might not look well on themes, but we are trying to break that wall and come up with some very innovative designs that have never been applied to teams before nice tony morelan 23 15 i'm really looking forward to seeing what polycube produces out of that now, you had mentioned diversity and i love everything you've been talking about, like when it comes to diversity with your designs and the global reach for that tell me specifically about polycube, what are you guys doing when it comes to diversity and inclusion? derrick lee 23 34 we are actually planning on recruiting designers from abroad it doesn't matter where you're from sure, you can be from united states you can be canada, you can be from japan, wherever because we don't want to end up stuck in one way of thinking when it comes to designing and promoting yeah, and i think that's, that could be one of the best ways to stop that from happening tony morelan 23 55 sure because i know just culturally wise you know, people from specific cultures just have a way of approaching their designs so to hear that you are looking for designers, you know from other cultures, i think is a great way to ensure that that you really are offering up great work globally yeah, thank you so you know there are a lot of other theme designers out there a lot of companies have had success is there one company that really comes to mind when you think of a theme designer that you really like derrick lee 24 27 i think that a company called echo visuals yes yeah if you check out their themes they're excellent and we took a lot of inspiration from them tony morelan 24 35 yeah no i've heard that from many designers echo visuals does amazing work and i know that they are very active on facebook and other social media platforms really doing a lot of stuff around marketing so just another good example of how a company does more than just create their things but they have to do all that work behind the marketing yeah so i know you sound very passionate when it comes to your work at polycube but what is you do outside of polycube to have a little fun well, derrick lee 25 04 i obviously love themes, but i don't think about them 24/7 i need some time off to you know, re-energize myself i trained jujitsu do yeah, i actually had a dream of becoming a commentator in mixed martial arts really? yeah, um, you know, that never came to fruition, obviously, but i'm still a fan of the sport i really follow it and it doesn't just help physically it helps mentally which ultimately leads to better productivity tony morelan 25 32 i love hearing that aspect of it you know, for me, i do a lot of cycling now okay and it's not so much for the exercise part of it it's the mental side of getting out eating away being unplugged, either taking in the sights or enjoying the, you know, the fresh air derrick lee 25 49 yeah, i totally understand one last tony morelan 25 50 question for you derrick lee 25 51 okay tony morelan 25 53 what is your favorite donut? derrick lee 25 55 my favorite donut? um well, i always go with the classics chocolate donut scores yeah, well, not just with donuts, like with i think that's just how i am with anything i always go with the classic like hamburgers like everything i always like the original yeah and actually, do you know what being aids are? no, i don't know it's, it's kind of i wouldn't call it a donut but some people do call it call them donuts yeah, it's something that you can have when you come to new orleans oh, i'll tony morelan 26 25 have to give that a try is there anything unique to korea when it comes to donuts? derrick lee 26 30 i'll get to korea when anything comes to korea like what when pizza first came to korea? sure you know, it was a long time but korea like really likes you know, making 1000 flavors of pizzas 1000 flavors of hamburgers 1000 flavors of everything yeah ice creams yeah so yeah, i think that could be one thing that you can enjoy if you know people from abroad, travel korea, you know, there are things that you wouldn't have imagined tony morelan 26 58 how funny that you say that so when i was in korea, i remember going to a restaurant that it was strictly cakes it was like you said it was like 1000 different cakes and you would go in there and walk through all the showcases of everything and then you would pick your slice and it was amazing derrick lee 27 15 yeah, i can't even imagine like what flavors it has it was a tony morelan 27 19 dream but hey, derrick, i really appreciate you taking the time it was great to chat with you i'm looking forward to 2022 to see what more polycube does when it comes to creating beautiful designs? no okay, thank you closing 27 33 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 27 48 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s03e02-derrick-lee.html

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Episode 1, Eric Krause

Seamlessly Integrate “Add to Wallet” for Samsung Wallet

Snowprint Studios' CEO Alexander Ekvall Discusses Award-Winning Games and Success with Galaxy Store

Episode 5, Aurelien Lavaud

Episode 10, Chris Shomo

Native App

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Episode 7, Tomas Joscak

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Episode 2, Derrick Lee

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