Snail Walk: Walking Game

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Inspiration

You've probably seen the meme about the snail that's always coming for you. I built it because I wanted this kind of experience in my own life, an extra incentive to move more, and to encourage some of my friends and relatives to do the same.

What it does

You progress in game by walking in real life to escape Bob the giant snail. Steps are synced using Apple Health / Health Connect. There's also a social and competition aspect. Every player shares the same path, so you walk past other people's graves and can pay your respects and overtake those who are still alive. You pick Bob's pace yourself, anywhere from a gentle 500 to a brutal 50,000 steps a day, and you can compete on weekly, monthly and all-time leaderboards.

How I built it

React Native (Expo) for the game client, a Hono API server on Node, SQLite (Turso) for the database, RevenueCat for subscriptions/IAP, Apple Health and Health Connect for step data, Astro + PixiJS on Cloudflare Workers for the website and the outwalk.me leaderboard, PostHog for analytics, Sentry for crash reporting, and Remotion for the marketing videos.

Challenges I ran into

Mainly with health data sync on Android and then making the UX as simple as possible as I didn't want to overwhelm users with many options while still keeping it engaging and competitive.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

People have walked over 10M steps already to avoid being caught by Bob the snail. That made my day!

What I learned

How to work with payments and RevenueCat for iOS/Android + a lot of mobile dev kinks. I measure every onboarding step and turned out that forced sign-in was causing 50% user drop-off. I removed it and moved the paywall into the game world making it a lot more engaging and interesting.

I also learned RevenueCat for iOS/Android payments, and that building in public is my best acquisition channel so far.