NUMAD20S-Andres-Ben-Tom-DietClash!

Eat Veggies, Fight Monsters!

Diet Clash is a game application dedicated to promoting healthy eating habits over time; application users log and are awarded points based on food consumption. The end of each day is then followed with information regarding their total consumption. Users are intended to maximize their points, and points awarded are contingent upon food quality. These points are compared against user-set goals and correspond to progress made against an in-game boss monster. To assist the user in eating healthily, the user can use location to search for nearby grocery stores or supermarkets so that they can find healthy alternatives to eating out.

This application will target users from ages 15 to 22. This audience is grounded in the assumption that users within this range of high school students to young adults will be interested in the game mechanics of bosses while understanding goals and the importance of eating healthy. Though the app will be tailored to allow consumption from a wide audience range, the Diet Clash team will assume that users below the target age will not utilize all application features (i.e. tracking progress and improvements over time); similarly that older users will not need a point based system to incentivize healthy food consumption.

Diet Clash is intended to promote healthy eating and eating habits, primarily addressing the problem of not having a balanced diet. Current application competitors for healthy eating and eating habits include, but are not limited to the following applications: “Calorie Counter - MyFitnessPal”; “Calorie Counter and Diet Tracker”; “Track - Calorie Counter”. What differentiates Diet Clash from its competitors however is that the application will incorporate simple fantasy RPG elements in the form of pitting users against bosses they must defeat by eating healthy. This, in turn, makes it a possible competitor to the application “Habitica”, which uses RPG elements to incentivize real world habits. Diet Clash’s focus on eating healthy, however, differentiates it. Diet Clash will be especially innovative in that not only will it incorporate both game attributes and eating healthy; but it will target employ boss fights; the elegance lies in directly translating eating habits into the health of a fictional character. This demonstrates to users the importance of eating healthy and rewarding them for doing so. Additionally, Diet Clash is different in that it shows nearby grocery stores, as to give the user a way to improve their eating habits.

To maintain user engagement and repeated use of the application, Diet Clash will utilize five key features. These features are to retain the user base, after the application’s novelty wanes. Features will include the use of the following: (i) a progress bar; (ii) notification if a food entry has not been made after a set amount of time; (iii) long-term challenge; (iv) incorporation of bosses based on total progress; and (v) achievements for accomplishing particular game milestones. We feel confident this is within scope to be completed.

Considering the current design proposal, there will be two potential weaknesses - firstly, that it will be possible however for users to cheat, as eating will be self-reported. Cheating will be operationally defined as omitting unhealthy eating or false entering health eating events. Since this is however, at its core, an application for the user’s self-improvement, Diet Clash will have to respect if users choose not to engage with the application as intended. Meanwhile, Diet Clash will rely upon entering food consumption in the form of servings and food groups. Many foods however cannot be fit into one food group, or do not contain a full serving in a particular group - not to mention people are generally bad at judging appropriate serving sizes.