Riser

Inspiration

I'm a chronic snoozer. Not the "five more minutes" kind: I've actually missed important things in my life because I stayed in bed. And the worst part is I can't even trust myself to fix it. My half-asleep self turns off the alarm before my awake self knows it rang.

Regular alarms ask you to tap a button, and a sleepy brain will always tap the button. So I wanted an alarm that half-asleep me physically can't cheat: one that only stops when I'm actually up and moving. But "do 10 push-ups at 6 AM" is a punishment, and nobody sticks with a punishment. I needed a reason to want to get up.

That's where the game came from. In Riser, my real morning is the level. Get up, do the mission, and my little buddy flies to work and the island grows. Sleep in, and the crops wilt and the buddy catches a cold. It's not about losing everything; it's about not wanting to let a tiny guy down.

I'm a student at Ateneo de Manila University, and Riser is my first ever iOS app. I'd never shipped anything to the App Store before, and the part I was most scared of was money: subscriptions, free trials, receipts, restores, all the stuff that has to be perfect or nobody pays (or worse, people get charged wrong).

RevenueCat was the magic answer. One SDK and a dashboard, and suddenly the scariest part of the app was the easiest. Trials, monthly, yearly and lifetime plans, trial eligibility and Restore Purchases all just worked, with no server and no user accounts to build. I could even test real purchase flows with RevenueCat's Test Store before my App Store products were set up. That's what let a first-timer like me spend my time on the fun part: the game. And Shipaton gave me the deadline that turned "someday" into "shipped". Thank you both. 💛

What it does

Riser is a native iOS alarm clock crossed with a cozy companion game.

You name your wake-up buddy and set an alarm. It's a real system alarm (Apple AlarmKit), so it rings like the built-in Clock app, and you can use the iPhone's own alarm sound. When it rings, tap Start Mission and finish a quick wake-up mission:

• Push-ups and squats, counted by the camera. Apple's Vision body-pose detection tracks your elbows or knees live, draws your skeleton on screen and counts each full rep, entirely on device. Nothing is recorded.
• Item Hunt. Find a real object ("find a cup") and show it to the camera. On-device image classification recognises it, and you can reroll for a different item.
• Brain Warm-up. Quick mental math.

Escape-proof mode (optional): stop the alarm without finishing your mission, or quit the app halfway, and it rings again after 10 s, 30 s, 1 min or 5 min (your choice) until the mission is done. It gives up after an hour so it can never ring forever.

Win the morning and your buddy flies by balloon to the Farm Island, harvests the crops you've been growing and waters the rest. A shift report shows the wage, streak bonus and mood. The coins build your island.

Crops only grow when you rise. Each won morning grows every crop one stage. Sleep in and the farm feels it:

One good morning brings them back. You never lose your island.

In the evening your buddy comes home, and at a bedtime Riser works out from your alarm (five 90-minute sleep cycles plus time to drift off), they head to bed and you get a reminder to do the same.

Why keep playing

• Career: showing up gets your buddy promoted, and each rank raises the daily wage.
• Home: the tent becomes a cottage. Go inside and decorate with furniture from the market, and buy hats.
• Island: place buildings and decorations wherever you like, expand to new islands, and pay a weekly upkeep so coins stay meaningful (unpaid bills become debt).
• Vacations: on days with no alarm, book your buddy a trip. You can watch them there, and they come home with a postcard.
• Streak calendar, letters, achievements, and a limited Harvest Festival with exclusive decorations.

Best Game: gameplay, art direction and monetization

• Gameplay: your real morning is the level. Getting up and moving → the commute and shift → coins and XP → build, decorate, travel → a reason to get up tomorrow. Growth only happens on mornings you win, and neglect has gentle, recoverable consequences (wilting, a rain cloud, a cold), so the pull is caring for your buddy, not fear of losing everything.
• Progression and replayability: crops that take several mornings to ripen, a career ladder, island expansions, home decorating, vacations, streaks and seasonal events.
• Art direction: a toy-like floating diorama in a real, live sky, all handmade in Blender.
• Monetization fit: a results-first onboarding (a short quiz turns your snoozing into hours won back each week), then a RevenueCat paywall: a 3-day free trial on the yearly plan ($29.99/year), plus $4.99/month or a $59.99 lifetime purchase. An honest timeline shows the charge date, and a reminder notification is scheduled before the trial ends. Coins are earned by playing only and can't be bought, so the game is never pay-to-win.

Design Award: what to look for

1. A real sky. The sun and moon are positioned for your location and time, with the real moon phase. Live weather (Apple WeatherKit) brings rain, drizzle, snow, fog and thunder with lightning to the island. The clock at the top is made of 3D clouds.
2. Handmade 3D. 105 models built in Blender and rendered in SceneKit at up to 120 fps on ProMotion iPhones. Soft PBR with a sky-tinted rim light, grass and flowers that sway in the wind, windows that glow at night, bloom, and depth of field for close-ups.
3. A companion with feelings. Happy, sad, sick and sleepy states. Your buddy walks around buildings (A* pathfinding over the island), reacts when you pet them, and even has something to say if you tap them while they're at work or on vacation.
4. The morning commute. A balloon flight from home to the Farm Island, a camera glide, crops popping into coin bursts, and a watering animation, then the shift report.
5. The push-up skeleton. The live pose overlay, rep chimes and haptics make exercise feel like a game.
6. A calm Liquid Glass UI (iOS 26) in SF Rounded, with one status line that always shows the single most important thing.

How judges can test it

1. Download from the App Store and start the free trial.
2. Open Alarms (bottom left) › choose an alarm › set the mission to Push-ups at 3 reps.
3. Tap "Test the full alarm in 1 minute" and lock the phone. When it rings, tap Start Mission.
4. Missions can also be practised any time from the Alarms screen without waiting for an alarm.

How we built it

• Apple frameworks: SwiftUI (Liquid Glass), SceneKit, AlarmKit and App Intents, WidgetKit Live Activity, Vision (body pose and image classification), WeatherKit, Core Location, AVFoundation, UserNotifications
• Monetization: RevenueCat: one riser_pro entitlement, offerings for yearly / monthly / lifetime, trial-eligibility checks so returning users never see a trial they can't get, Restore Purchases, App Store server notifications, and the Test Store for testing purchases in debug builds. No backend, no accounts: RevenueCat's anonymous app user IDs are the whole identity system.
• 3D: Blender, scripted in Python

Privacy: no accounts, no analytics, no tracking. Camera frames never leave the phone.

Challenges we ran into

• Counting push-ups with a phone on the floor. Apple's Vision body-pose detection gives you joints, not reps. Elbow angles look completely different side-on vs. facing the camera, and knee push-ups broke my first version. I ended up with two counting modes (side-on elbow angle, and a front-facing mode that tracks how far the shoulders drop) plus smoothing so the skeleton doesn't jitter.
• An alarm you can't escape, without being cruel. Escape-proof mode re-rings if you stop the alarm or quit mid-mission. It took a lot of testing to get the follow-up alarms right: same sound you picked, the right delays, and a hard stop after an hour so it can never ring forever.
• Bugs that only showed up on a real iPhone. The simulator looked fine, but on my phone the math keypad only registered taps on the digit itself, and the morning cutscene could get stuck. Testing every build on a physical device became a rule.
• App Review. Apple came back asking for a full screen recording of the app on a real device and detailed notes. I recorded the whole flow (onboarding, paywall, alarm, push-ups, the game), answered every question, resubmitted, and asked for an expedited review with the deadline coming up.
• Making a game, not just an app. 105 3D models built in Blender, a sky that follows the real sun, moon and weather, and a buddy that walks around buildings. Keeping all of that smooth at up to 120 fps on a phone was a project of its own.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Shipping my first ever iOS app, with a full subscription business behind it from day one (thanks to RevenueCat).
• Push-ups and squats counted live by the camera, entirely on device, with nothing recorded or uploaded.
• A real system alarm (Apple AlarmKit) that rings like the built-in Clock app, even when the phone is locked.
• A cozy island where everything is handmade: 105 models, a live sky, weather, a career, home decorating and vacations.
• An honest paywall: a 3-day trial with a clear charge date and a reminder before it ends, and coins you can't buy, so the game is never pay-to-win.

What we learned

• People don't need more alarms; they need a reason to get up. The game is what makes the alarm stick.
• Test on a real device, every build. The simulator hides the bugs that matter.
• App Review is part of the product. Clear notes and a good screen recording are what get you approved.
• Consequences should be gentle and recoverable. A wilting crop and a buddy with a cold motivate more than losing a streak forever.

What's next for Riser

• iCloud sync so your island follows you to a new phone (still no account needed).
• An in-app way to upgrade from monthly to yearly or lifetime.
• More missions and more islands, plus seasonal events like the Harvest Festival.
• Siri and Shortcuts support for setting alarms and missions by voice.

Built With

• alarmkit
• app-intents
• avfoundation
• blender
• core-location
• ios
• python
• revenuecat
• scenekit
• swift
• swiftui
• usernotifications
• vision
• weatherkit
• widgetkit
• xcode