I made a simple phone game that draws on fitness stats from your wearable. The game’s concept is quite simple: Fight monsters to gain experience points and gold, while using real-life factors to determine its behavior.

Fitness stats like cardiovascular strain and sleep determine a character’s strength and health. Other real-world factors, such as current weather and moon phase, determine which monsters appear. By using mundane events in the real world to create fun game mechanics, I hope to encourage my players to view daily life with a layer of whimsey. Naturally, this would also encourage players to form better habits.

I published a demo. Try it out!

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How did I make this?

The tech stack I used for this is quite straightforward. I used PostgreSQL to store data and Django to create the REST API. I chose Expo/ReactNative to generate a mobile-friendly frontend as I wanted the option to publish my game as an iOS app. Lastly, I decided to use DigitalOcean to host the entire app because it was fairly straightforward to set up automated deployment for the frontend and the backend of my project.

Aspirations

I want to pull in more real-time data, such as user location or meditation minutes. Additionally, I want to make the gameplay more complex, and use a storyline and art to make the game more compelling. I would also consider adding NFT items as a way for the game to generate profit. A player could pay to mint a weapon, for example.

Learnings

I view the current incarnation of this game as a proof-of-concept, and I learned quite a bit while building this version of the game. Here’s what I’ll do for my next version:

  • Deploy early and often - I want to publish a live version of my game as early as possible so I can get feedback at every step of development.
  • Start with the integrations - I’m moving from Whoop to Apple Health, since Apple Health has far more users and allows for developer integration.
  • Web is okay! - Getting published on the App Store is a whole thing. I want immediate feedback on my app, so I’ll publish my game to the web before I focus on creating an iOS app