FitFarm
Fitness-based Farmville parody where players raise their own farm through real-world exercise

At the health-themed hackTrin III, I teamed up with Nicholas Cimaszewski and Vincent McAuliffe to create FitFarm, a fitness-based farm management game where players raise their own farm through real-world exercise.

The app tracks players’ steps in real-life using HealthKit, and converts those steps on a 1:1 ratio to in-game currency named CardioCoins (we really liked alliteration) that can be used to buy supplies for their personal farm akin to the game Farmville.

A view of the FitFarm progress screen that converts the number of steps the player took since last app load to in-game currency.

Implementation

I programmed the majority of the app in Swift, with some Objective-C bridged over in order to implement HKHealthStore, Apple’s API for accessing data from HealthKit. I also worked with Nick to design and source the art assets, and Vincent made a landing page for the app, which you can find here.

Intrepid readers will notice the similarities between FitFarm and Data Farm, another project I’ve worked on, though they’ll also notice from the screenshots that we were able to actually create a prototype with basic game mechanics working as opposed to just a proof of concept of the data tracking mechanism.

The main menu screen of FitFarm. A view of a FitFarm farm in its early stages. A view of the FitFarm shop where players can buy supplies to build their farm. A view of the Choco Bar Shop in FitFarm where players can pay real-world currency to expedite their farm's progress.

Over 8 hours of hacking, 75% of the time was spent figuring out how to actually integrate HealthKit into our application. (Turns out that requesting permissions to access a client’s HealthKit data is the first step to resolving all your problems.)

Result

After an open demo round where all the participating teams were allowed to present, we won 3rd place at the hackathon!

The FitFarm development team after winning 3rd Place at the hackTrin hackathon.

You can view the source code for FitFarm here.