Interview – All About How Real Life Powers Fitness Gaming App Infitnite

https://ift.tt/5d3Lrvt The fitness app market has grown considerably in recent years, but a lot of them are a little too dry – failing to ta...

https://ift.tt/5d3Lrvt

The fitness app market has grown considerably in recent years, but a lot of them are a little too dry – failing to take advantage of the fact they can actually be fun.

The newly launched Fitness Fantasy RPG app Infitnite – available on Android and iOS – understands that, and we were lucky enough to talk to its creator Walter Chambers all about what it does differently. Spoiler: quite a lot.

Infitnite is a Fitness Fantasy RPG where physical training, nutrition, mental development, and social activity contribute to your Warrior’s progression.

We chatted to Walter about the challenges of creating the app, how fitness is already a game in itself, and how his coaching experience shaped a game designed for fitness newcomers and experienced trainees. 

Hi Walter! Can you tell us about the process of developing Infitnite, and how the idea for the app came to be?

The best way I can describe developing Infitnite is a mix of familiarity, discovery, and a lot of learning. Gaming has been one of my biggest passions for basically my entire life, especially RPGs. I also had experience with computer science and making smaller games in school, and at one point I thought that was the direction my career would take.

Instead, I chose health and fitness because I felt like that was where I could make the greatest impact on people’s lives. My own health journey had already changed me, and in 2013 my dad being diagnosed with cancer completely changed how I looked at the value of health. It stopped being something abstract. Health became the foundation everything else in life sits on.

Infitnite eventually became the way I could marry those two sides of myself: my passion for gaming and what I believe is my purpose in health and fitness.

I’d also been indirectly approaching life like an RPG for years. The parallels are everywhere. You gain experience. You develop skills. You make decisions that move you closer to or farther away from a goal. You hit plateaus. You learn new strategies. You keep building your avatar, except in reality that avatar is you.

During COVID, I finally started approaching that idea directly. I sat down with a piece of paper and asked myself: if I were to make fitness an RPG, what would it actually be like?

It started with connecting different training styles to the way RPGs use classes and builds. Then I started drawing lines between the people I’d coached, the goals they were pursuing, the obstacles they faced, psychology, nutrition, progression systems, and all of the RPG mechanics I’d spent my life playing.

The idea felt different, but familiar. I knew games and I knew fitness. The scary part was turning something that existed in my head into something another person could actually experience. That’s really what the last five years have been.

Each version has gotten closer to the vision I had when I first sat down with that piece of paper. With 5.0, it’s the closest it’s ever been.

What were the biggest challenges developing the app?

The biggest challenge was actually manifesting that vision. For a long time, I didn’t have the time, resources or technology to build the entire platform myself. Earlier versions of Infitnite had to rely on third-party fitness, coaching and gaming platforms.

Those tools made Infitnite possible, but they also created a ceiling. I could build XP systems, progression, rewards, quests and other RPG mechanics around the experience, but I was still putting them inside software that was fundamentally designed as fitness software. Someone could see Infitnite marketed as an RPG, download it, and understandably expect the interface and experience to feel like a game.

That gap between what I could imagine and what I could actually deliver was probably the hardest part.

Eventually I realized I couldn’t solve that by continuously stacking more game systems on top of a fitness platform. I had to build the RPG itself and make the real-world systems part of the game.

Infitnite 5.0 is the result of that decision. The world is organized into locations, each housing tools and services for a different part of your fitness journey, such as building workouts, logging meals or reviewing training. I can now connect those tools to the story and your Warrior Avatar within one RPG, instead of fitting the experience into separate platforms.

Doing that as a solo indie developer created another challenge entirely.

I once broke down the current development process and counted roughly 33 different functions I move between. Game direction, engineering, frontend, UX, behavior design, narrative, art direction, sports science, analytics, security, QA, release management and everything in between. Even something like converting exercises into monsters has to make sense from a game-design perspective, a training-science perspective, a lore perspective and a technical perspective at the same time.

That’s really the difficulty of building Infitnite. Most fitness products don’t have to function as RPGs, and most RPGs don’t have to generate meaningful real-world fitness outcomes.

If I had to summarize the challenge in one sentence: creating an experience that looks, feels and functions like an RPG while being powered by real-life fitness progression.

Were there any key inspirations – in gaming or elsewhere – when it came to developing the game?

There are a lot, because Infitnite isn’t based on one particular RPG. It’s more like a culmination of what I’ve loved about the genre throughout my life.

Final Fantasy is probably the most important to me personally, especially Final Fantasy VII. It was foundational in teaching me what RPG progression could feel like: EXP, leveling, attributes, skills, customization and the Hero’s Journey. Cloud’s story also goes much deeper into identity, internal conflict, perception and self-discovery, which are themes that connect surprisingly well to the psychological side of real-world transformation.

The Elder Scrolls influenced the idea that skills develop through actual use. You get better at something because you repeatedly do that thing. That’s an incredibly natural bridge to fitness.

Dungeons & Dragons had a major influence on worldbuilding, lore and the idea that classes and different builds can give two people completely different approaches to the same world.

World of Warcraft influenced the social side. Quests, community, competition, cooperative challenges and the idea of eventually bringing players together against something larger than any one person.

Then there’s Diablo, especially build crafting and the core gameplay loop. Diablo is incredibly good at making repetition feel meaningful because you’re always working toward something. That’s very relevant to fitness because training itself is repetitive. The design problem is making that repetition feel like progression rather than monotony.

There are other influences too. Path of Exile is a great example of just how deep branching progression and build complexity can become. High fantasy and dark fantasy outside gaming have shaped the world as well.

Even the first few seconds of Infitnite pull from games that left an impression on me. When I designed the 5.0 title screen, I went back to Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts, Skyrim, Elden Ring and Ocarina of Time and looked at why those screens made me feel something before I had even started playing.

The goal isn’t to copy those games. It’s to understand why those systems and experiences work, then ask whether the same principles can give real-world progress more meaning.

Are there any differences between the iOS and Android versions of the game?

Platform parity has been one of the major goals of Infitnite 5.0. I didn’t want somebody on Android playing a fundamentally different game from somebody on an iPhone. The core experience, progression, content and updates are designed around everyone being in the same world.

One Warrior Account also carries your supported progression across phone and tablet devices rather than creating separate versions of your journey.

That makes development harder because I’m not optimizing for one device. I’m dealing with different operating systems, older phones, newer phones, tablets, screen sizes and hardware combinations while trying to protect the same experience across all of them.

There can still be added capabilities that are specific to a platform.

Apple Health is the best current example. Players on Apple devices can give Infitnite permission to access supported Apple Health data, and we’ve now moved that into automatic syncing so it doesn’t need to become another thing the player constantly has to manage.

That’s an additional capability rather than a different game. The larger goal is still parity, including expanding comparable health-data integration on Android.

Is this a game that will appeal to both existing fitness fanatics and those looking to exercise more regularly?

Absolutely, and my coaching experience is probably one of the biggest reasons I’m confident saying that. I’ve been lifting and training for 20 years, designing programs since 2005, and coaching for over ten years. Over that time I’ve worked with people across a huge range of starting points, from someone who barely knows where to begin to competitive athletes trying to find another one percent.

Those people don’t need the same thing. A beginner can improve very quickly, but they usually need clarity. What should I do? Why am I doing it? What matters right now? What comes next?

For somebody who’s already highly trained, one percent can be enormous. Their problem isn’t usually a lack of effort. It’s identifying the limiting factor and finding a more precise strategy.

Infitnite’s progression philosophy comes from working across that whole spectrum. The other person I’m designing for is the gamer who says, “I’m not a fitness person.”

You don’t need to be. You don’t even need to know much about fitness. You need some desire to improve something about yourself.

That’s one reason the 5.0 experience begins as an RPG. You enter a fantasy world. You experience the story. You create your Warrior Avatar. Your goals, experience, preferences and choices start shaping the world around you.

Then fitness becomes part of that progression rather than feeling like an entirely different activity you’re being forced to do. The goal isn’t to turn everyone into a stereotypical “fitness person.” It’s to use a language many of us already understand, progression, builds, quests, strategy and challenge, as a path toward becoming a better version of yourself.

Can you tell us more about the Living Quest mode in the app?

The easiest way to explain Living Quest is as a roguelite workout mode. Instead of locking every part of your workout in before you begin, the Quest can evolve while you’re playing it.

You encounter options. You make a choice. That decision affects what comes next. So two runs don’t necessarily have to follow the same path.

The important part is that Living Quest isn’t random exercise for the sake of novelty. I always say: if you do random things, you should expect random results.

Variety is great for keeping training interesting, but if there’s no structure underneath it, that variety can work against progression. Living Quest is my attempt to find the balance.

Your experience level affects difficulty. Your Avatar choices influence what kind of training you’re doing and what goal you’re moving toward. The equipment you have available and the choices you make during the workout can change the route. The larger Combat system includes 1,500+ monsters built around real exercises. That’s where the roguelite comparison makes sense.

There’s unpredictability and replayability, but you’re still playing a build. You still have a goal. Your choices still matter. And underneath the fantasy, it’s still a progression-based workout.

Why do you think there is an increased popularity in gamifying fitness, and what do you think sets Infitnite apart from other titles in this area?

I think more people are realizing that health and fitness doesn’t need to be driven entirely by pressure. A lot of us grow up hearing that we should exercise, we should eat better, we should take care of ourselves.

That doesn’t automatically make any of it engaging. Sometimes all of that pressure does the opposite. People avoid fitness until something finally forces it to become important. Games approach motivation differently. They give you feedback, progression, strategy, choice, challenges, identity and reasons to continue.

So it makes sense that more fitness products are starting to borrow those ideas. Where I disagree with a lot of approaches is the assumption that you can take a normal fitness tracker, add points and badges, and suddenly you’ve solved the engagement problem.

I’ve spent five years learning that the novelty of gamification eventually wears off if the thing underneath it isn’t actually helping you progress. Fitness is already a game. Most people just don’t realize they’re playing it.

There are skills to develop. There are strategies. There are resources to manage. There are builds. There are diminishing returns. There are plateaus. There are decisions that move you closer to or farther away from your goal.

Infitnite tries to make that invisible game visible and then connect it to an actual fantasy RPG.

Combat is your physical progression. Alchemy is nutrition. Intellect covers mindset, habits and learning. Influence deals with the social side, relationships, reflection, community and the effect we have on one another.

Those aren’t four unrelated trackers. They’re interconnected because that’s how health works in reality. You can train incredibly hard and still plateau because nutrition is the problem. You can understand training and nutrition perfectly and still struggle because consistency, psychology or support is the limiting factor.

That’s where my coaching background matters. The problem isn’t only solving whatever obstacle is directly in front of somebody. It’s understanding what obstacles are likely to come next and building systems that help them navigate those too.

There’s also a design philosophy around monetization that matters to me. Pathfinder is the free foundation of Infitnite. A player can create their Warrior Avatar, enter the world and progress without subscribing. There aren’t ads, microtransactions, battle passes, energy gates or a way to simply purchase the levels and power you’re supposed to earn through your own actions. 

Vanguard is an optional paid subscription for players who want more structure, tools and guidance. One example is the curated Quest library: complete workouts for different training styles and experience levels, drawing on sessions I’ve refined over years of coaching, player feedback and tracked results. It gives players a structured session to follow without having to design it themselves. Those workouts are authored in advance. Magical Intelligence offers a separate way to create Avatar-tailored Forged Quests on demand around your goals and equipment. Players can continue with Pathfinder without subscribing.

For me, that’s important. If your real-life actions are supposed to have meaning inside the game, the game can’t turn around and sell you a shortcut past them.

What is next for Infitnite, are there any updates or expansions planned you can tell us about?

The focus of the now released Update 2 is improving onboarding, Combat, and overall reliability. I want new players to have a clearer introduction to the game and a more consistent experience as they progress. 

After that, two future plans I’m most excited about are World Bosses and the return of Tournaments. World Bosses take a familiar MMO idea and connect it directly to real-world exercise.

A boss appears for the entire Infitnite community. It has a specific exercise tied to the encounter. Players attack it by performing that movement, and their real repetitions contribute damage toward a shared health pool. The boss only falls when the community collectively does enough.

That’s the kind of thing I’ve wanted Infitnite to become: not a game telling you that you defeated a monster because you tapped a button, but a monster going down because players actually did the work in real life. Tournaments bring another side of that progression back.

Competition can be incredibly motivating when it’s structured correctly. Some players are going to care about beating somebody else. Others just want a leaderboard that gives them a benchmark and lets them see themselves climbing over time.

But ultimately, World Bosses and Tournaments are features. The larger thing I’m trying to build is an experience that helps someone recognize that they’ve already had the ability to create change in their life. Infitnite isn’t supposed to magically give you that power. It’s supposed to help you understand it, develop it, and give you a clearer path for using it.

I’ve seen what happens when health suddenly becomes important because something bad happens. My dad’s cancer diagnosis was one of those moments for me. I don’t think everybody should have to wait for a diagnosis, an injury, a scare or something happening to somebody they love before they finally feel a reason to care about their health.

There can be another reason. Maybe you start because you’re curious. Maybe because the game looks fun. Maybe you just want to see what you’re capable of.

If that eventually helps you become a stronger version of yourself, mind, body and spirit, that’s what I built Infitnite for.

Thanks to Walter for his time! You can find Infitnite on the App Store and Google Play right now.

The post Interview – All About How Real Life Powers Fitness Gaming App Infitnite appeared first on Gamezebo.

from Gamezebo https://ift.tt/uOrHkWP