Game idea: an app game that’s able to sync to a FitBit or other step tracker system. It would be a gatcha-style game where you pull for different characters that you can “work on”. When you select a character, every step = a calorie count added to them. Basically, it would be an app that encourages casual fitness (like, general health/movement goals rather than irl weight loss) by fattening up various characters.
I’m an artist and writer, so I couldn’t even begin to approach knowing how to make this on the technical side. Still, I think it would be super fun and useful! I could also see it having collaborations with various artists, who add their characters/art to be pulled in the gacha element (each character would probably come with a description that can include ownership/social media info). I don’t have any concept art or anything at this stage, so I’m not sure if I can put it in the “seeking collaborators” area. Still, if you read this and would be interested in working with me, or have any general feedback on the idea, please let me know!
This would be a large undertaking. Each smartwatch would require its own unique solution to be compatible. On top of that, if you want it to run on the phone, you need a mobile dev who are rarer than a normal dev.
Building IOS and Android apps would be almost completely separate app.
One idea would be to develop it for android smart watched. That’s almost the same as developing an android version. Still a lot but not as much since you only need to support 1 type of watch.
One other solution would be making it gps based(like Pokémon go). Any website can request gps so you’d only need a website developer (way more common) and it would run on anything with a browser. If you don’t/can’t host it yourself (which could cost money if it gets popular) offline websites are a thing and there are tools for android, iOS and all pc/macs to run sites as applications.
Hmm, I was hoping that there was a fairly consistent step tracking system between those that could be applied, as that’s the only thing from the watches it would need. You might be right, though, that GPS would be better, given the relatively small number of people who use those watches, at least compared to mobile use in general. I don’t know how precise those GPS services are, though. One thing I don’t like about Pokemon Go is how it’s pretty unusable to people in rural areas, or who can’t go very far due to disability/lack of transportation/severe allergies/weather conditions. Would using a GPS service be able to track if someone is moving around a smaller area?
The official GPS site says it’s accurate to 4.9m. This however is using actual GPS. Some sites nowadays get around the request to share your location data by guessing your location via your internet access. From the limitations you mention, that sounds more like Pokemon Go uses this latter system but I haven’t used either system so you’d have to research/test yourself.
I wonder if you could do something like eat the dungeon with this concept. I know it’d get me walking more as long as the tech isn’t to invasive or demanding, step count wise.
one thing that could be fun would be if the character is your personal trainer. the “story” reason why could be something like while you are out walking they are stuck in the step tracker or whatever so they have to just sit and wait.
an unrelated to weight gain idea I had is an JRPG where you have to travel a lot and your real life steps counts towards their destination. you would basically pick on a map where you want to go and then you would have to “walk there”. I bet someone has already made that but still
I think it would be really cool, too! And yeah, guest art from all sorts of people would be great! I’m not sure if anyone would be willing to do the programming for it, though. Maybe making a visual mock up would help bring someone in?
well ETD itself is a time sensitive combat puzzle basically, thats influenced by what stats you put into each character, and also how each character interacts with each other and the enemies. So for something like this you could tie some amount of XP to step count. Or maybe you could make steps a resource that a player can spend on abilities in combat. it could be a universal pool that drains when you choose some action in combat, or maybe you have to pre-allocate your Walk Points before you embark on a dungeon crawl.
This is just an idea Ive had just now: theres potential for individual character interaction with the step counter, like for example, a character that heals half a hit point per every three steps, lets say. This could apply mid combat, and if you level this character up for a while, a future skill they could get would be that their body could effectively be a bank of steps. Every step makes them a little bit fatter, and you can spend some of that step-flab in or out of combat to heal other party members.