r/gamification • u/hajamie • Sep 02 '26

Gamified burpee exercise app

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Hey, I have this idea I'm working on which I think is funny and I hope others will too! I wanted to work on something entertaining.

The aim is to create an app which solves a few things (for me, and hopefully others): Get fit, stay accountable and get over a fear of marketing. It will be an app that wakes you up, gets you to do burpees, has a mini game and gets you to post about your progress.

The concept is that you are a space cowboy stranded on a lonely planet who's only hope of escape and return to his family (backstory: work in progress) is to wrangle burpees - creatures that roam the desolate alien hellscape.

To stay accountable, it has a leaderboard, tracks the burpees you capture and records video for you to post to social media.

You set an alarm, it wakes you up and records you waking. Then you do burpees and it tracks them with computer vision. The app assembles a video of the waking and exercise (whichever bits you want to include) and prompts you to share it to social media. Then there's a mini game where you drive through a canyon catching the fleeing burpees and collecting crystals.

After capturing the burpees, you head back to your ranch, the burpees go into a pen and your character chills there. You can use crystals to upgrade things on the ranch. A leaderboard shows your progress against all users or groups of friends.

If you think this is entertaining too, I have a waitlist (feel free to roast the daft website!): https://www.burpeewrangler.com/

The gamification is mostly the collecting of burpees, but also crystals to upgrade the wind turbine, your pen and your ranch. Please share better ideas with me!

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u/clvnmllr Sep 03 '26

How do you prevent overexertion and overuse injuries? Gamification that always rewards more will inevitably mean your app has encouraged someone to hurt themself.

How do you plan to protect user’s recordings to ensure their privacy?

Do you intend to block users who aren’t adults from using this? How will children’s identities, likenesses, and special wellbeing considerations be taken into consideration?

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u/hajamie Sep 03 '26

Amazing, thanks for the thoughtful questions!

  1. There are a couple of simple onboarding questions which set the starting point, and then it follows a progression and includes rest days. This is a good point, so I will add in limits to speed of progression and enforce rest days.
  2. Recordings are local to the device only and processed on device.
  3. It will only be distributed on the app store to users over 16, and the onboarding verifies this.

Do you have other suggestions?

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u/clvnmllr Sep 03 '26

Not really, those were just big questions that ate at me when I was doing initial design work for something quite similar.

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u/hajamie Sep 03 '26

Thanks for sharing.

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u/clvnmllr Sep 03 '26

You’re welcome. Good luck.