Battle Buddies

A native iOS + Apple Watch habit RPG: your real workouts, reading, and meditation level up a pixel-art buddy — then your buddy battles your friends’.

SwiftUI · CloudKit · watchOS · currently in TestFlight beta

Home screen: pixel buddy Rex at level 1 with today's XP per attribute

Pixel-art battle replay in a gym arena with a victory banner

What it does

Real habits, real XP

Workouts, steps, stand time, mindful minutes, and sleep flow in from Apple Health and become XP across six classic RPG attributes — plus an honor-system quick log for the things sensors can’t see, like reading or practicing a skill.

A buddy that grows with you

Your pixel-art buddy levels up and visually evolves through six tiers as you stay consistent. Streaks (with a weekly rest-day shield) reward showing up, not bingeing.

Social by design

Connect with friends via invite links, nudge each other, run week-long stat duels, and pit your buddies against each other in deterministic auto-battles replayed as pixel-art fights.

Private by architecture

There is no server. Everything lives in your own iCloud via CloudKit; buddy features use Apple’s zone sharing between the participants’ accounts. No ads, no analytics, no accounts.

How it’s built

› SwiftUI + SwiftData — iOS 17 and watchOS 10 apps sharing a Swift package core
› CloudKit — the entire backend: private-database sync, CKShare zones, push subscriptions
› Deterministic battle sim — seeded combat math, re-verified on the opponent’s device — no server referee
› AI pixel-art pipeline — sprites, icons, and backdrops generated via an image model, then quantized to a true pixel grid with reproducible recipes