Go Go Crawler

Rougelike Fitness app! Fun gameplay first so that players actually want to walk and be more active!

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Inspiration

Admittedly I could be healthier. I work from my desk all day, and I don't do a good job of prioritizing activity. My hobbies are gaming, coding, and woodworking, so two out of the three involve me sitting for prolonged periods of time. Over the course of my 16 years in the 9-to-5 world I have tried every app known to mankind to help me get more excited about activity. They all fall short for me. Either the gates are too harsh or they're too easy. Lately a lot of fitness games have shipped monetization paths that sell you shortcuts, which seems to defeat the actual purpose of the thing you downloaded. And even when one of them does get me to walk a little more, the game underneath is too simple to make me want to walk again tomorrow. The core loop just isn't there.

What it does

It's a dungeon-delving roguelike where your steps are the currency.

You buy your run with the day you had. Steps from your day bank into the run. Before you descend, you spend them on boons that power the run up. Walk more, start stronger. There's no other way to buy in.

You can raise the stakes before you leave the house. Make a step pledge, hit it, and you earn run tokens. Complete a workout, earn more. Pledges are the part I'm most attached to, because it's the only mechanic I've built that made me leave my desk on purpose at 4pm.

Then you actually have a game to play. Ten levels, three bosses, and a run loadout you build from skills across four classes. Skills have charges and that's the whole tension: at a rest stop you can refresh your charges, restore your HP, or upgrade a skill's power level, and you can't do all three. Every rest stop is a small argument with yourself about which resource you're going to run out of first.

And the run leaves things behind. Artifacts drop from events, shops, and bosses, and they push a build somewhere you didn't plan on going.

Meta Progression keeps you coming back. Death doesn't mean defeat! When you die, you extract with gold that buys upgrades between runs and makes your next run easier!

How I built it

Lots and lots and lots of coffee. It's Flutter, with Hive for local state, Supabase on the back end, and Health Connect and HealthKit doing the step reading. One developer, one playtester.

Challenges we ran into

EVERYTHING In all seriousness the biggest challenge is making the game fun. Fun is a hard target to hit.. Making a game thats fun and balanced and encourages players to keep engaging with the content is a full time job in of itself.

I also don't have any artistic abilities. I have always wanted to learn how to draw and create my own assets but sadly, I didn't have enough time. So finding enough assets that tied together to have a cohesive feel was difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of how far its gotten. As a chronic starter of projects, to have a live project in less than 6 weeks is wild to me.

What's next for Go Go Crawler

Balance and polish. Most of the core systems are in place the main thing now is polish, balance and bug fixing. As hard as targeting fun can be, I also think it could be more fun!

Built With

  • flutter
  • googlefit
  • healthconnect
  • healthkit
  • revenuecat
  • supabase
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