Ideas for a Fitness game (since rising heroes seems dead)

[waterhouse]

Greeting, fellow rebels!

 

I'm learning web development on my own, and since the game Rising Heroes appears to be pretty dead, I thought I could get some practice by coding a fitness related game. I have thought of two main ideas, and I can't decide on which one to implement:

 

1) A game which is more or less like fitocracy, but in which you create a "quest" for yourself (for example, a 6 week challenge in which you go to the gym 3 times a week), and as each day passes, if you complete the workout successfully, you get the narrative that corresponds to the corresponding day of your quest, kill some monster(s) and get some loot. The idea here is tthat the quests would be longterm, but with small in-game achievements to motivate you. There could also be team quests. If you quit, you'd be disgraced (-1000 reputation). If you failed to complete your exercises you would die or be injured or something. The focus here is to track a workout plan while giving you a cool narrative for motivation.

 

2) A text-based realtime MUD, in which you explore the world, possibly with a team, and find hostile creatures. To kill the creatures you have to perform sets of bodyweight exercises. The stronger the creature, the harder the workout. For example: cave rat: 1 pushup + 3 situps; Dragon: 15 sets of 30 pushups + 20 sets of 50 situps. If you fail, you lose health, and if you win you inflict damage.

 

If there are several people in the team, you divide the sets and reps among yourselves. The exercises would be bodyweight to make the game more fluid and realtime. The game should be something you could play from home, but I might create specialized areas for gym rats. No PVP fighting would be allowed, because I feel that the pressure of losing to another human would motivate people to cheat and use poor form. I might also integrate running/walking as a means to go somewhere. Travelling great distances in the game would require running or walking (probably shorter) distances in real life. Of course, there will be loot! This would require a great deal of honesty on the part of the players, but we're all grownups here who know that when you roleplay, you have to lose sometimes to have fun. The goal here is to create a game in which fitness is an integral part and motivate collaboration between players, which could even play the game together.

 

Because both types of games would allow me to train different skills as a developper, and both concepts seem pretty cool, I'm currently undecided (even though I might be more in tune with the second concept)... I wonder if the nerfitness community would like to see any of these concepts implemented.

 

DISCLAIMER: this is not "market research". I might eventually release to the public a paid version of one of these projects, but in the short term, I'd just like to implement something cool and have fun. I think I will have more fun if I implement something that people actually like and use, and that's why I am asking here waht you would like to play.

If you feel this falls under the clause of "don't promote yourself or your product", please be free to delete the post.

[Salivanth]

How good are you at web development? MUDs are complicated, and if you're still a beginner, a single-player RPG might be more effective. This would also let you adjust the difficulty. For instance, you could ask the player to do 10 push-ups as an assessment, and base their challenge accordingly.

- I can't even do one push-up (Very Easy)
- I got through 1-5 push-ups. (Easy)
- I got through most/all of the push-ups, but it was quite hard. (Medium)
- I got through all 10 push-ups, and it was easy. (Hard)

This could also serve as a project to build up to a MUD. Another idea is that instead of basing all your gameplay around fitness, you incorporate fitness into an RPG with it's own gameplay. For instance, special attacks are charged with exercise rather than mana. Or enemies have special attacks that force you to do an exercise in order to continue with the fight. But you still have HP, normal attacks, have to reduce enemy HP to 0, etc.

This also solves the problem of cheating. If people are going to cheat in a single-player game, nobody else suffers.

[Oramac]

Greeting, fellow rebels!

 

I'm learning web development on my own, and since the game Rising Heroes appears to be pretty dead, I thought I could get some practice by coding a fitness related game. I have thought of two main ideas, and I can't decide on which one to implement:

 

1) A game which is more or less like fitocracy, but in which you create a "quest" for yourself (for example, a 6 week challenge in which you go to the gym 3 times a week), and as each day passes, if you complete the workout successfully, you get the narrative that corresponds to the corresponding day of your quest, kill some monster(s) and get some loot. The idea here is tthat the quests would be longterm, but with small in-game achievements to motivate you. There could also be team quests. If you quit, you'd be disgraced (-1000 reputation). If you failed to complete your exercises you would die or be injured or something. The focus here is to track a workout plan while giving you a cool narrative for motivation.

 

2) A text-based realtime MUD, in which you explore the world, possibly with a team, and find hostile creatures. To kill the creatures you have to perform sets of bodyweight exercises. The stronger the creature, the harder the workout. For example: cave rat: 1 pushup + 3 situps; Dragon: 15 sets of 30 pushups + 20 sets of 50 situps. If you fail, you lose health, and if you win you inflict damage.

 

If there are several people in the team, you divide the sets and reps among yourselves. The exercises would be bodyweight to make the game more fluid and realtime. The game should be something you could play from home, but I might create specialized areas for gym rats. No PVP fighting would be allowed, because I feel that the pressure of losing to another human would motivate people to cheat and use poor form. I might also integrate running/walking as a means to go somewhere. Travelling great distances in the game would require running or walking (probably shorter) distances in real life. Of course, there will be loot! This would require a great deal of honesty on the part of the players, but we're all grownups here who know that when you roleplay, you have to lose sometimes to have fun. The goal here is to create a game in which fitness is an integral part and motivate collaboration between players, which could even play the game together.

 

Because both types of games would allow me to train different skills as a developper, and both concepts seem pretty cool, I'm currently undecided (even though I might be more in tune with the second concept)... I wonder if the nerfitness community would like to see any of these concepts implemented.

 

DISCLAIMER: this is not "market research". I might eventually release to the public a paid version of one of these projects, but in the short term, I'd just like to implement something cool and have fun. I think I will have more fun if I implement something that people actually like and use, and that's why I am asking here waht you would like to play.

If you feel this falls under the clause of "don't promote yourself or your product", please be free to delete the post.

I like both ideas as well, though I'd personally lean towards the first.  But taking some elements of the second would be cool too, like the traveling distance part for runners and such.

 

Another idea is that instead of basing all your gameplay around fitness, you incorporate fitness into an RPG with it's own gameplay. For instance, special attacks are charged with exercise rather than mana. Or enemies have special attacks that force you to do an exercise in order to continue with the fight. But you still have HP, normal attacks, have to reduce enemy HP to 0, etc.

 

This is a fantastic idea.  

[waterhouse]

Thanks for a your reply, full of interesting ideas and great advices!

 

How good are you at web development?

 

I'm a beginner in web development, but I have some programming experience (in a research context)

 

MUDs are complicated, and if you're still a beginner, a single-player RPG might be more effective.

 

True, but I think that being multiplayer might stimulate some (healthy) competition. Of course it would be harder to implement, and I appreciate the suggestion of starting RPG first.

 

I'll try to implement it in a way that makes it easy to generalize to multiplayer with something like python's gevent serverside hooked to a database representing the world. Client-server communication would be implemented with websockets, which allows me to write the client in javascript that runs in the browser.

 

This would also let you adjust the difficulty. For instance, you could ask the player to do 10 push-ups as an assessment, and base their challenge accordingly.

This is something I thought about, but ultimately I'd like to have areas with different difficulties (with easier or harder monsters), so that the player would first want to clear the lower level areas and then proceed to the higher level ones. I'd really like to capture the feeling of the hero that just returned from a dangerous adventure, in which monsters had literally been defeated with "physical combat", while those still limited to the safer areas stare in awe at all the loot.
 

Another idea is that instead of basing all your gameplay around fitness, you incorporate fitness into an RPG with it's own gameplay. For instance, special attacks are charged with exercise rather than mana. Or enemies have special attacks that force you to do an exercise in order to continue with the fight. But you still have HP, normal attacks, have to reduce enemy HP to 0, etc.

 

I was thinking in replacing dice rolls with sets of exercises. For example, for each attack, you perform 5 pushups. If you succeed, you hit with high probability (you should have a probability of failure to make things interesting). If you fail, you are hit with high probability. When you are hit, you lose HP as usual. Howerver, your idea of recharging special attacks with exercise is just amazing! Definitely something to think about...
 

This also solves the problem of cheating. If people are going to cheat in a single-player game, nobody else suffers.

 

Point well made. The feeling of awe before the victorious hero would instantly disappear the moment someone started cheating. Maybe that is the strongest argument to be made against a MUD based on mutual trust among the players.

 

Thanks again for your time, and for your great reply.

[Salivanth]

Happy to help. The idea of an exercise-based RPG has crossed my mind a couple of times, so I was just sharing some of the stuff I'd already brainstormed up

[Chris-Tien Jinn]

There's another thread in a similar vein:  http://rebellion.nerdfitness.com/index.php?/topic/55473-fitness-games/where we're working on some ideas.  A lot of game mechanics are often tested out in the accountabilities thread ... or the PvP thread (like DarkRaider's Nerdhammer game). 

[waterhouse]

Thanks for the link, Chris-Tien Jinn.

 

Your thread looks great too. I'll have to get a good look at your ideas.

 

The main difference from my project here is that all your games are essentially board games with a roleplaying component.

I'm mostly pursuing this as a programming exercise that is also meant to be fun.

[Chris-Tien Jinn]

Thanks for the link, Chris-Tien Jinn.

 

Your thread looks great too. I'll have to get a good look at your ideas.

 

The main difference from my project here is that all your games are essentially board games with a roleplaying component.

I'm mostly pursuing this as a programming exercise that is also meant to be fun.

 

Well, I'd love a good MMORPG fitness game - and I twiddle with designing and coding pieces.  If you get to a point where you could use help, let me know. I'm much more an RPG player than a board game player, but the base mechanics of board games are easier to translate to casual digital games. 

 

Meantime, check out Six to Start's offerings of fitness games:  http://www.winterofworkouts.com/ 

 

I'm loving Zombies, Run!   The Walk hasn't grabbed me as firmly, in part because they used the same voice actors and it's disconcerting to hear them in different roles.

[waterhouse]

Currently I'm implementing the MUD idea.

Progress has been slow because I can't find a perfect fit that merges exploration with combat and with exercise.

 

I have reached the following conclusions:

- fights with several human players (even if there is no PVP) are extremely awkward

- using exercise (e.g. pushups) to land a blow on your opponent is bad because once you can't do a single pushup, you've lost the fight (you'll be too tired to continue fighting). This causes you to either win the fight without suffering a single blow or die.

 

I'm thinking now of using exercise challenges (e.g. "Do 10 pushups now!") to explore the game world. Practical example (user input in blue):

 

> The ceiling has collapsed into the corridor. You must push aside the stones blocking your passage

> Do 10 pushups! (done/quit)

> done

> Some boulders have been pushed, but others remain in your way. Again!

> Do 10 pushups! (done/quit)

> done

> You're almost there... You can already see the light on the other side!

> Do 10 pushups! (done/quit)

> done

> You push the last boulder aside and step into the light.

> Right behind you, the unstable ceiling collapses again, rendering the corridor impassible without pushing the boulders aside.

[you'll have to repeat the challenge to go back]

 

To climb into the village of the tree dwelling elves / mountain trolls / palace of the ice queen on top of the glacier you have to do pullups (but because you are now high above ground, you die if you fail, or other variation).

 

Combat would be mostly hack'n slash, possibly with spells and special abilities, and maybe experience points (this eliminates the multiplayer awkwardness and would allow PVP fighting). Some fights could be decided based on challenges ("climb the body of the demon to cut his throat with your sword" - more pullups; for extra fun, you could be randomly fall to the ground and would have to climb again).

 

Having spells, experience and levels would force me to give some attention to balancing issues in the game, which I would like to avoid... Maybe I'll remove levels and experience and base the results of the combat in the weapons, bonuses and equipment.

 

Some challenges could be divided among players (e.g. pushing boulders aside) while others could not (e.g. climbing the tree, which would make no sense). Dividing challenges among players would allow the challenges to be harder (e.g. to push the boulders out of the way you'd have to do 150 sets of 10 pushups)

 

For those who are interested, my "technology stack" is the following:

 

• client side:
  • a simple HTML page with JQuery with socket.io for websockets
  • the text can be arbitrary HTML with rich text formatting (all text is generated on the server); limiting the text tothe fonts and colors you find in most MUDs is in my opinion unnecessary
• server side:
  • Python for everything
  • flask with flask-socketio for websockets
  • sqlalchemy for the database (with flask-sqlalchemy extension); the actual database will be sqlite for the time being

I still don't know where I'll hoste it - probably OpenShift.

 

I still haven't decided how I will generate the world (text files vs XML vs raw python) and how much procedural content it'll have.

I'll probably allow players to "customize" their characters by editing the character description (what other characters see when they look at them). This allows players to create characters from any race (think ninja turtles, hercules, etc.) with any cosmetic characteristics they want.

[Salivanth]

Another option that you could consider, given the nature of a game like this (Eventually you will run out of steam and be forced to give up for a while) is to instead create a Clash of Clans type game, where exercises, resources, and time are all required to build up your town. (Perhaps the ultimate home gym setup, with simple stuff like push-up bars all the way to ridiculous stuff like actual stores that set up shop there?)

Example:

Push-Up Bars:

Reduces number of push-ups required for an activity by 1 per level.

Resources required for Level 1: $20, 5 push-ups, 30 minutes.

Rock-Climbing Wall: (Pre-requisite: Pull-up Bar Level 5, Rings Level 3, 1 pull-up)

Reduces number of pulling exercises required for an activity by 1 per level.

Resources required for Level 10: $100,000, 300 chin-ups, 24 hours.

 

Pre-Workout: (Prerequisite: Fitness Store Level 1)

All exercises count as double reps for the next 10 minutes.

Resources required for first one of the day: $X, 20 jumping jacks. (X is a sliding scale based on your income. Perhaps it always costs a certain amount of minutes worth of income, even as your income increases. Doubles every time, so you can never just be constantly using this buff.)

[waterhouse]

I like the "clash of clans" idea. The turn based game with turnings lasting one day or something is a natural fit for a fitness game.

If i find the mechanics of the MUD too hard, I might switch to that idea.