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Battle
RPGYou
Track: Apps for Your Life
RPGYou is an iPhone RPG where the stuff you do in real life—starting with sleep—affects the character you actually play.
Last night’s sleep can change today’s adventure.
That is the whole idea.
Most wellness gamification gives you points, badges, streaks, or some other number that does not mean anything outside the wellness app. I did not want to build another system where the reward for doing something difficult is watching a progress bar move.
In RPGYou, sleep affects the same adventurer you take into combat.
What it does
The submitted build contains one complete playable loop:
- RPGYou reads sleep data from HealthKit or uses a bundled synthetic sleep fixture.
- It processes that evidence locally through a deterministic pipeline.
- The result can affect the adventurer’s Exhaustion, rest status, HP recovery, Hit Dice, and other game resources.
- The adventurer enters tactical combat using their current condition, inventory, Role features, Action Commands, and a once-per-encounter Last Stand.
- Winning awards persistent XP. The player can then take a short rest, continue down the trail, or return to camp.
The most important health-data rule is simple: unreliable data never screws the player.
If sleep data is missing, denied, incomplete, ambiguous, invalid, or unavailable, RPGYou treats it as neutral. The game does not assume the player failed just because HealthKit could not prove otherwise.
Judges can play the entire loop in an iPhone Simulator without creating an account, connecting to the internet, entering an API key, sharing personal health data, or enabling live HealthKit access.
Why it is different
RPGYou does not turn sleep into arbitrary wellness currency.
Sleep changes the adventurer’s actual condition. It can affect recovery, resources, and the choices available during combat. The health system is part of the RPG instead of a separate score pasted on top of it.
I also did not want to build another streak system that makes people feel guilty when real life gets in the way.
Sleep can matter without the game moralizing about it. RPGYou responds to the evidence it has, applies the appropriate game result, and moves on.
What I built during OpenAI Build Week
RPGYou entered Build Week as a sleep-processing prototype.
During the submission period, I turned it into a playable vertical slice with:
- A persistent Player model
- A versioned Barbarian Role
- Typed effects connecting sleep evaluation to game state
- Deterministic tactical combat using RPGYou’s own focused rules
- Action Commands with untimed VoiceOver and Switch Control alternatives
- XP and leveling
- Hit Dice, short rests, and camp recovery
- Safe, versioned persistence
- A handcrafted Wounded Orc encounter
- Seeded encounter generation for repeatable testing
- A complete flow through camp, preparation, combat, recovery, and results
- Unit, integration, and app-target tests
- Automated combat validation across 2,000 generated seeds
The repository documents the pre-hackathon baseline and the dated Build Week commit range. Judges can see what existed before the event and what I built during it without having to take my word for it.
How I used Codex and GPT-5.6
I used GPT-5.6 to help me think through the product.
That included challenging the idea, comparing gameplay options, defining acceptance criteria, reviewing architecture, catching scope creep, and forcing me to decide what the actual playable slice needed to be.
I used Codex to work directly in the repository. It helped implement and refactor features, generate tests, run deterministic simulations, verify builds, and document the Swift packages and iOS app.
The AI made the work faster. It did not make the product decisions for me.
I made the final calls on the game’s direction, mechanics, visual design, health-data safety rules, architecture, and what counted as finished.
RPGYou does not send health data to OpenAI, and the app does not call the OpenAI API at runtime.
Privacy and safety
HealthKit access is optional, read-only, and initiated by the player.
RPGYou only requests the sleep information needed by the game. Sleep samples are processed locally in memory. Raw health records are not stored, transmitted, or written to production logs.
The bundled synthetic fixtures use the same processing pipeline as HealthKit data and provide the supported judging path.
RPGYou is a game. It is not a medical device, and it does not provide medical advice, diagnoses, or treatment recommendations.
Running the project
Open RPGYou.xcodeproj in Xcode.
Select the RPGYou scheme, choose an iPhone Simulator, and run the Debug configuration.
The bundled synthetic sleep fixture makes the full sleep-to-rest-to-combat loop available immediately.
The repository README includes the five-minute judging path, setup instructions, architecture boundaries, Build Week commit evidence, verification results, and more detail about how Codex and GPT-5.6 were used.