OutQuest / Everyday adventure
Turn the life you want into a quest you can finish today.
I designed and built an iPhone and Apple Watch app that turns meaningful real-world goals into tiny quests, XP, streaks, badges and family rewards.
Live productVisit OutQuest
The problem
Most goal apps are good at recording ambition, not creating momentum.
The things people want to improve are usually too big for a Tuesday evening: get healthier, save more, spend better time with the family. A dashboard can measure those intentions without making the next action any easier.
I wanted to explore a gentler model. Instead of another productivity system built around an endless list, OutQuest asks one useful question: what is the smallest real-world quest that would move this forward today?
The product bet
Borrow the language of games, then point it back at real life.
OutQuest turns goals into daily and weekly quests across health and fitness, finance, and family and fun. Completing something useful earns XP, builds a streak and unlocks illustrated badges, while planned rest days prevent the system becoming another guilt loop.
Pip, a small acorn adventurer, gives the experience warmth and continuity. The visual system feels like a calm storybook rather than a loud arcade game: parchment surfaces, moss-green actions and small moments of ceremony when effort deserves recognition.
- 01Turn long-term goals into achievable weekly actions.
- 02Offer playful random quests when structure feels too heavy.
- 03Make progress visible through XP, streaks, seasons and badges.
- 04Treat rest and recovery as part of the plan.
Two devices, two jobs
The phone plans the adventure. The watch gets you moving.
The iPhone is the control centre for goals, weekly planning, family settings, rewards and history. The Apple Watch is deliberately smaller: see what is left, start a timed quest, complete it and get back to the world around you.
That split shaped the interaction design. The watch could not become a compressed version of the phone, and the phone could not bury today’s action beneath setup and reporting. Each surface had to protect a different part of the same loop.
Trust by design
Family motivation only works when the adult controls stay clear.
Family Mode lets an adult create child profiles, set goals, approve completed quests and define rewards. Children see a simple path to points; adults keep control over what counts and when a reward is granted.
I kept the system local and private: no child accounts, public profiles, social feed, leaderboard or location sharing. Sensitive adult actions use Face ID or the device passcode, and HealthKit access is optional and read-only.
The build
A playful idea became a complete native product system.
I built the app in SwiftUI with SwiftData persistence, HealthKit step reading, local notifications, Live Activities, Watch Connectivity and a companion watchOS experience. On supported devices, Apple’s on-device Foundation Models can generate fresh weekly quest ideas without sending goals to a Valdris AI server.
The work stretched beyond screens. It included migration-safe data models, family approval logic, achievement exports, accessibility, reduced-motion behaviour, app-store assets and a shared design language that remains legible from an iPhone dashboard down to a watch-sized quest card.
The outcome
The reward loop works because the real achievement happens off-screen.
OutQuest now supports the full journey from onboarding and goal choice through planning, completion, watch sync, family approvals, rewards, seasons and collectible badges.
The most important design decision was also the simplest: the app should help someone close the app. Every screen exists to make a small real-world action easier to begin, clearer to finish and a little more satisfying to remember.
What it taught me
Good gamification gives meaning to effort, not just points to taps.
OutQuest taught me that a reward system becomes useful when it celebrates behaviour people already value. The game layer should make the next real action feel possible, then get out of the way while life happens.