Activity dashboard
Daily goal progress, distance, best day, current and longest streaks, seven-day averages, and scrollable step history.
Fitness-powered iOS RPG · In development
Your daily steps become the energy that moves the story forward.
Step By Step connects HealthKit activity to a choice-driven RPG. Walk in real life, convert movement into energy, and spend it on decisions inside Survive.
Current build: HealthKit tracking, energy conversion, fitness and story achievements, and a five-day Survive adventure.
Project overview
Making movement part of the game—not a metric beside it.
Step By Step asks a simple product question: what if progress in a mobile story depended on progress away from the screen?
The app turns real activity into a game resource. HealthKit supplies step and walking-distance data, a conversion system translates steps into energy, and story decisions consume that energy alongside health. The result is one connected loop rather than separate fitness and storytelling features.
Project origin
Step By Step expands the original Survive project into a deeper system with fitness data, persistent progress, achievements, checkpoints, and replayable outcomes.
- Project purpose
- Encourage everyday movement by making physical activity useful inside a narrative game.
- My role
- Independent product designer, iOS developer, systems designer, and story creator.
- Technology
- Swift, SwiftUI, HealthKit, Swift Charts, MVVM, Combine, and UserDefaults.
- Fitness system
- Daily goals, step and distance history, streaks, seven-day averages, trend comparisons, and achievements.
- Story system
- Five playable days, 28 chapter records, energy and health costs, saved progress, attempts, one completion ending, and a replayable failure state.
- Privacy approach
- The app requests read access for steps and walking or running distance; project progress is stored on the device.
The core loop
Walk. Convert. Decide.
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01
Move in the real world
HealthKit brings daily steps and walking distance into the app while progress is measured against a personal step goal.
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02
Turn steps into energy
The daily goal is divided into ten energy segments. Completed segments can be converted into points for the player.
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03
Spend energy on choices
Story decisions carry energy and health consequences, linking activity directly to survival and progression.
Built into the current project
One app, four connected systems.
Energy-based gameplay
Steps become a capped game resource that is spent on story choices and reset as part of the daily activity loop.
Persistent story progress
Players can resume or restart Survive, follow chapter progress, track attempts, and reach completion or failure states.
Achievement milestones
On-device milestones cover steps in a day, total steps, total distance, and completed story days—with earned dates retained.
In-development build
The fitness loop, seen through the story.
Daily steps become energy before the next story session begins.
Illustrated chapters combine long-form narrative with player status.
Each action makes its health and energy cost visible before selection.
Story progress, attempts, resume, restart, and achievements stay together.
Building the product
Turning two data worlds into one experience.
The central design challenge is keeping fitness data, player state, and branching story progress independent enough to test and evolve—while making them feel inseparable to the player.
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01
Make activity part of the core mechanic.
The fitness layer has meaning because it changes what the player can do, not simply what the dashboard displays.
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02
Keep HealthKit behind focused boundaries.
Health data retrieval, step calculations, achievements, and story state live in separate models and view models.
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03
Translate history into useful signals.
Best days, streaks, averages, trends, and milestones make raw activity data easier to understand.
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04
Design persistence around returning players.
Saved chapters, health, energy, goals, attempts, and earned achievements support short sessions across multiple days.
Current status
Playable now. Still growing.
Present in the build
- HealthKit steps and walking-distance access
- Goal-based step-to-energy conversion
- Fitness history, trends, streaks, and achievements
- Five-day Survive story with saved progress
- Completion and replayable failure outcomes
Next areas to explore
- Additional Survive branches and alternate endings
- Deeper story-specific achievements
- More adventure cards beyond Survive
- Interface polish, accessibility, and localization
Project lineage
Survive supplied the story. Step By Step built the system.
The original Survive app was my first Swift project and taught me the foundations of navigation and state. Step By Step carries that story forward with real-world movement, resources, checkpoints, achievements, and a larger replay loop.
Contact
Want to talk about the build?
I’m always glad to discuss SwiftUI, HealthKit, gamified fitness, or the product decisions behind Step By Step.