PetWalk is a virtual pet & fitness tracker for Android Wear that can motivate you to walk outdoors & socialize with other players. In this game, you have to take care of your fitness & your pet's health, hunger, and affection. Take a walk every day as you discover, metamorphose, & befriend different kinds of pet species with your virtual companion!

Before I created this project, I identified problems that we see everyday related to physical and mental health among young adults:

• Weight awareness (Overweight & Underweight)
• Social anxiety and depression
• Lack of enthusiasm in exercising & going out for a walk.

I had an idea to create a smartwatch game that could solve these problems, PetWalk: A Virtual Pet & Fitness Tracker!

PetWalk is a virtual pet on your smartwatch that responds to your physical activity. You can hang out with your virtual pet by taking a walk every day. By taking a small exercise by walking, you can discover new items, encounter wild pets, and gain experience points for your pet to help them metamorphose into a more advanced form. The social aspect of this game is you can interact with nearby player by challenging them for a friendly match and trading rare pets to complete your encyclopedia.

PetWalk combines 2 technologies of the past and the future. This game is heavily inspired by virtual pets in the 90s: Tamagotchi & Digivice. Although virtual pets at the time had a reputation for driving kids' attention away from doing schoolwork or chores, they are good for introducing kids the meaning of sympathy and nurturing pets. IoT health-tracking devices such as fitbit, is one category of an emerging technology that is highly potential to be very common in the future. I would like to explore the true potential of health tracking devices by integrating both inspirations into one product. While having similar features to the original concept of virtual pets, PetWalk encourages its users to maintain a balanced & healthy life through exercising & socializing with others.

To keep consistent with the theme of the game, I created a simple sketch of the desired core features of the game which include pet interactions as well as health monitoring for the users.

Features:

• Take a walk with your pet to discover new pet species & obtain unique collectibles while your progress is stored in a graph that can show how many steps you walked so far.
• Feed healthy food, play mini games, & customize your pet's room to keep your pet happy & healthy.
• Pets can metamorphose into its next stage by fulfilling different criteria. The greater its stage, the more powerful it gets & the more items it can find!
• Socialize with nearby players by challenging them for a friendly match or trading rare pets and items via Bluetooth!

After creating the information architecture, I created the wireframes using 3 design tools: Photoshop for pixel-perfect raster image editing, Illustrator for high resolution vector images, and Aseprite for the pet sprites which are stylized as pixel art. I also narrated the button clicks and navigation in the wireframe to provide more clarity how the game works.