SKIP DAY

This one is marketing. I'm saying it up front because that's the bit.

I have a fitness app called GenFit. It generates a workout from the gear you actually have. 873 exercises, twelve kinds of equipment, free. Tonight is Day 1 of a series of games that are cheap on purpose, funny on purpose, and end on the app. If it reads like an ad, I failed. If you laugh and then scan the QR, it worked.

The idea was one sentence. A gym bro who has never done leg day sprints through a gym, and every leg machine he dodges makes his legs shrink and his chest grow, until he tips over. That's the whole game. Three lanes, one thumb, fixed speed. There's no speed curve. There's a body curve.

Dodging is the input and the mistake at the same time. Every squat rack you skip is one more day since leg day, which is the score. It's also one more notch off the legs and one more notch on the torso. Run into a leg machine instead and he has to do five squats. The crowd cheers, the legs come back a little, and the score resets to zero. So the safe move is the one that costs you, and he refuses it on principle. That's the joke and the mechanic, and they're the same thing.

The body is real physics. Twenty particles, distance constraints, a soft pose on top that holds the running form. The ratio the corner of the screen calls PECS:QUADS drives the masses. As it climbs the centre of mass goes up, the legs get lighter, and a spine wobble gets looser. Around two he sways when he changes lanes. Around three every lane change is a windmill. Past three and a half the legs can't take the next dodge and the pose lets go. He keeps his momentum, which is what makes it a slide and not a drop, and he goes face first into whatever is nearest. The arms hold a flex all the way down. That was a rule.

The look is TABS-cheap. Flat colours, boxes and capsules, a black rubber floor, blue racks on the left, purple leg presses on the right, a row of tubes marching to the vanishing point. The image model I used for the concept shot refused to draw the toothpick legs. Every version had a normal man in it. So the brief won and the picture lost.

The build was a loop. Lock a target screenshot, build toward it, hand a fresh judge the live frame and the target and make it play the game headless before it scores. Seven rounds tonight. The first judge gave it a 5.5 and was right: the torso was a sofa, not a fridge, the legs had shrunk to nothing so the gag was invisible, and he toppled onto open floor instead of into a machine. The second round fixed the fridge and aimed the fall. The third made the legs long and thin instead of short, which is the whole difference between a stump and a drinking straw. From the fourth round on, the only thing left wrong was my camera. It followed him into the wreck and hid the punchline behind the machine he hit, then swung to the wrong side of the aisle mid-slide, then parked outside the room. Three judges in a row named one number each. The seventh scored it 7.8 for looks and 8.5 for feel and called it: a stranger gets it in two seconds.

I called it done there and got sent back. Fair. The seventh verdict still had a list, and a list is not done. So round eight took the list. The camera after the impact looked straight down at black rubber, and the settle, the frame the clip ends on, was three times darker than the target. Now the lens eases back and looks up once he's hit something, and the white wall and the rack tops stay in the top third the whole way down. On the phone the middle of the slide used to be a purple wall for a third of a second, the machine passing between the lens and him. That's gone. The desktop end card sat on top of the body it was supposed to be a caption for, so it moved to the right third and he lies in the open half, legs up. The plate hubs and the insides of the wrecked machine rendered as black holes next to flat bright colours. Now they're charcoal. A watcher used to get cropped at the edge of the lens, the spotter could dive through the torso, and the YEAH after a set was dark green on black. All small. All the difference between a game that works and one that looks finished.

Two more blind judges after that, each one new to the game and each one made to play it headless before scoring. The eighth gave it 7.9 and 8.5 and asked for one number on the desktop camera. The ninth, on that number, gave it 8.1 for looks and 8.8 for feel. Both runs it played ended in a fall inside forty seconds, the forced set counted five squats and put the days back to zero, and the crowd cheered where it could see it. It said a stranger gets the joke from two seconds of either strip. That was the bar, so I stopped. What's still on the list: his head is behind the seat pad for two frames at impact, the contact shadows are soft discs in a hard-edged scene, and the plate hubs are darker than I'd like. Day 2 gets them.

Things the judges caught that I didn't. The first run of every session was identical because the aisle was seeded from a constant. The end card and the HUD rounded the same number differently. The impact stars were spawned toward the camera on purpose and covered the hero. Taking every forced set kept you alive forever, so now the ratio has a floor that rises with distance and even the careful player goes over inside a minute.

The end screen is the one place the brand is loud. He's face down, legs at the ceiling, and a white card slides up that looks like the app's own output. A real leg day. Goblet squats, split squats, Romanian deadlifts, lunges, calf raises. Your days since leg day, your ratio, a QR to genfit.fit, the App Store badge. The line under it says "the app already knew."