Shipaton 2026, one developer, two months, and a dungeon you have to walk into.

To my dearest 12 readers from my last HackerNoon post,

I know you 12 must have been on the edge of your seats, losing sleep and unable to focus at work. For that I am truly sorry, but fret no more! Without further ado, I would like to introduce my entry into Shipaton 2026: Go Go Crawler!

<Hold for applause>

<Continue holding>

Obviously from the title we all know what type of app it is, but for the 13th reader who wasn't a part of the original post journey, Go Go Crawler is a roguelike fitness app. The key to good app development is to cram as many buzzwords into an app as possible, and that's what I did here.

No. In all seriousness, GGC is my attempt to gamify fitness.

The problem is that I sit down for a living, and also for fun

Admittedly I could be healthier. I work from my desk all day, and I don't do a good job of prioritizing activity. My hobbies are gaming, coding, and woodworking, so two out of the three involve me sitting for prolonged periods of time. Over the course of my 16 years in the 9-to-5 world I have tried every app known to mankind to help me get more excited about activity. They all fall short for me. Either the gates are too harsh or they're too easy. Lately a lot of fitness games have shipped monetization paths that sell you shortcuts, which seems to defeat the actual purpose of the thing you downloaded. And even when one of them does get me to walk a little more, the game underneath is too simple to make me want to walk again tomorrow. The core loop just isn't there.

All of this changed for me, like the rest of the world, when Pokémon GO came out. The allure from childhood of capturing Pokémon in the wild was amazing. I went on so many walks that I never would have gone on, and I dragged my wife to random locations that were stock full of PokéStops. I really loved playing that game in the beginning.

So you might be thinking, "Oh, so this is a similar catch mechanic to Pokémon GO?"

Well, no. That's not to say I didn't try... I did. I spent many nights planning out how to make a game as enticing as Pokémon GO, and at the end of the day I had to admit the allure came from the intellectual property, not the core loop. A lot of people know this, but the PokéStops in Pokémon GO came from an earlier Niantic game called Ingress. Same bones, same walking, far less lightning in the bottle. Which is understandable, because of the IP. Solo developer Jon is not going to build a world as rich and as loved as Pokémon during a two-month Shipaton.

The first version was boring

After a lot of deliberation I landed on an adventure walker: choose your own adventure with some light combat, driven by your steps. I threw together the concept and prototyped it quickly. After the first playtest I was so bored that I stopped developing for a couple of days.

When I came back, I knew I had to rebuild it. I needed a core loop that was actually fun.

Fun is hard to target. If at any point you find yourself asking whether you're having fun, chances are you aren't. That makes deliberately developing a "fun" game very difficult. So I asked myself, "What do I find fun?" Well, I'm a basic gamer dad who loves roguelikes, RPGs, deckbuilders, tactical turn-based games, FPS.. the list goes on. The real question became: which elements of those games can you pull into a fitness app that encourage movement without sacrificing the complexity that makes things fun in the first place?

So I established a new rule: the game must be fun first. In my brain, I was a genius. I know that you, dear reader, already recognize the cognitive dissonance between "fun is impossible to target" and "rule one is target fun," but I did not and honestly it's good that I didn't, because otherwise I never would have built GGC.

So what is Go Go Crawler?

It's a dungeon-delving roguelike where your steps are the currency.

• You buy your run with the day you had. Steps from your day bank into the run. Before you descend, you spend them on boons that power the run up. Walk more, start stronger. There's no other way to buy in.
• You can raise the stakes before you leave the house. Make a step pledge, hit it, and you earn run tokens. Complete a workout, earn more. Pledges are the part I'm most attached to, because it's the only mechanic I've built that made me leave my desk on purpose at 4pm.
• Then you actually have a game to play. Ten levels, three bosses, and a kit you build from skills across four classes. Skills have charges and that's the whole tension: at a rest stop you can refresh your charges, restore your HP, or upgrade a skill's power level, and you can't do all three. Every rest stop is a small argument with yourself about which resource you're going to run out of first.
• And the run leaves things behind. Artifacts drop from events, shops, and bosses, and they push a build somewhere you didn't plan on going.
• Meta Progression keeps you coming back. Death doesn't mean defeat! When you die, you extract with gold that buys upgrades between runs and makes your next run easier!

The content is, frankly, a lot

Skills, events, enemies, bosses, dungeon maps, relic tables. It's a massive amount of work, and simply entering it all into the game doesn't mean it's balanced, or polished, or... it's a lot. Shipaton needs a prize for whoever submits at the last possible second.

Thanks for reading, all 12 of you

If you made it this far, I really do appreciate your time. The comments are always open if you've got ideas, or you've played a fitness game whose core loop actually held you, I want to hear about it.

Gameplay video next post? That one has moving pictures in it, which I'm told is how you get to 13 readers.

META