Introducing 7 Minute Superhero Workout
The future of fitness gaming. As you can probably tell from our writing here on The Burn, it’s something we at Six to Start think about. A lot. Which is why, roughly twelve months ago, we found ourselves pondering the question: “What would Zombies, Run! look like as an at-home workout app?”
Many long discussions, multiple filled-up whiteboards and several discarded game design documents later, we had our idea: 7 Minute Superhero Workout. Here’s the pitch:
You’re pilot of the prototype AEGIS One battlesuit, tasked with defending Earth against alien invaders. Your punches become plasma blasts and your abdominal crunches power your suit’s reactor!
In short, it’s a home-workout app that tracks your reps with your device’s front-facing camera, and turns you into a super-suit wearing badass, saving the day everytime you do a push-up.
As lead writer on the project, I had a lot of fun and a fair few sleepless nights trying to bring the exciting, heart-pumping storytelling that has made Zombies, Run! a smash hit to a new game. Our fantastic team of writers had to work hard not only to make our stories fit in with workouts that were planned to the second, but also to keep the action moving as fast as our players, and to write thousands of pages of script in just a few months — no mean feat!
In this series, I want to share that process with you, discussing the ins, outs and shake-it-all-abouts of what it’s actually like to write a fitness game. Amongst a whole bunch of other things, I’ll be talking about:
- How the game’s design and fitness aims influenced our choice of story
- How we managed our writing team
- The unique solutions we created to deal with the fitness routine
- How story serves exercise and how exercise can amplify story
- How a Superhero script is put together
- What we learned
So, stay tuned for the first part in the series: Starting Superhero.
