Our take on this is that - like your experience with VR - there is a way to make exercise fun, and therefore distract you from the work you're having to do during it.
Out of interest do you own a VR headset currently?
With Quell we're more focused on the immersive gamification - using combat fitness alongside a compelling story to engage users who find existing fitness gamification falls short of what they need to motivate themselves.
We would love to add sensor pads for kicks - Check out our stretch goal for it on the Kickstarter page!
How has the community element of LM translated to their app? Do you still have ways of engaging or competing?
We're absolutely on-board with the idea of multiple games - we have the launch title being developed (that you've seen in our current artwork), and others in mind. Out of interest, what would be your preferred style of game for combat fitness? We've had some good discussions around this in our Discord server.
To your concerns re: body posture and movement; you couldn't be more right about the importance of getting these aspects right. We have experience both within our team and our advisers covering everything from international boxing to prosthetic design - we are taking the ergonomics and science very seriously for this exactly reason.
As for the haptics, check our stretch goals on Kickstarter! It's something we're very interested in...
As for the story - you say you want to fight other players - what does that game look like to you? We're always interested in these ideas for future game titles we can bring into the platform. If you'd like to join our Discord channel I'd be happy to chat about this further in there.
I agree about the rhythm section and some of the menu downtime. As for the sweating, any game in the fitness space needs to recognise this! We're making sure the Gauntlet can be washed just like any fitness kit should be for this exact reason!
For us, it's about building something that is exciting enough to distract you from the workout you're doing - the gaming takes over from the awareness of your exercise in your mind. There are a number of ways to do this, some would include VR. For now we've opted against it as our users found VR fitness too sweaty and uncomfortable in its present form.
Where do you stand on VR? Do you have any of the headsets currently?
We all agreed there was a lot we could learn from it though - after all they've had 5 million downloads, so it's working for some people!
If you'd be interested to provide some thoughts on the direction we take with the game, we'd love to have you join the conversation in the Quell Discord channel.
We looked into leg resistance bands early on in the design stage, and user tests led us away from them. In reality, you can get plenty of resistance for the lower body from gravity and the right exercises - we're working on some different game dynamics to introduce things like squats and lunges.
We managed to get one of the first copies available after it had sold out through the lockdown, and have put in a good few hours over our lunchbreaks to benchmark against it. In our opinion Nintendo has done a really good job, and we even managed to break a sweat playing it.
That said, Ring Fit Adventure is limited to Switch users, and the game itself was not compelling enough to build a real fitness routine around (if Peloton and Zwift are too far in one direction, then RFA is too far in the opposite). It's taught us a lot about how important certain aspects from the game design will be as we continue building the Quell game world though...and anything that is encouraging people to look after their health gets a big thumbs up from us.
Variety is absolutely something to shoot for. Personally I've always been big on 'adventure' sports - I find that the distraction from the fact I'm working out allows me to have fun, and still stay (reasonably) fit! Not so easy to do when I'm back around home though - all these activities require time away...so building Quell allows for a more exciting workout whilst staying indoors (something that became a lot more relevant this year!)
One thing to note is that whilst the Gauntlet delivers resistance to upper-body motions, boxing is very much a full body workout. We're exploring a few different ways to maximise the core and lower-body elements of this within the game, but this is no case of skipping leg day!
Which streaming video service are you using? Any key parts of it that you think make it stand out against everything else you've tried?
Hey HN,We're Cam, Doug, Lorenzo and Martin, co-founders of Quell (https://quell.tech).Quell is an immersive fitness game which guides players through an exciting, effective combat workout at home. Players fight enemies with a low-cost wearable which uses smart resistance bands to simulate real combat training. Our aim is to be Peloton meets gaming meets boxing, at 1/10th of the price. We...