FAQ

Threkka is a fitness game, available exclusively for iPhone, that's designed to help people build healthy habits.

It's available on the App Store, here. And if there's no link there, it's because I haven't quite hit the Go Button yet.

Threkka combines the buzz of gaming with real-world fitness progress. Here’s how it works:

• Rebuild and Manage: You're tasked with bring a rundown gym in a parallel world back to its former glory, making decisions to revitalise and upgrade the Gym Between.
  
  
• Train Your Champs: In-game characters, known as Champs, need to overcome challenges and beat tough workouts to progress. Their success earns them Gold for gym upgrades and Supps.
  
  
• Earn Sweat: Champs need Sweat to train. The twist? You can only do this Sweat by taking your Champs along with you during workouts, exercise and movement – directly linking your physical activity to game progress.
  
  
• Real Rewards: As you move in your world, you help your Champs conquer theirs. This unique cycle motivates you to stay active, helping you build and maintain healthy exercise habits seamlessly.
  
  

Threkka isn't just a game; it's your fitness partner, making health and fitness engaging and rewarding.

Threkka is designed to be something you dip into a couple of times a day. You'll find your own rhythm, but here's an example:

• You're planning on heading out for an early-morning run, so you fire up Threkka. Humbert's nearly at 100% recovery, so you digitise him into fitOS, and then beam your You back to our world.
  
  
• So capture your run on your Apple Watch, same as usual.
  
  
• Once you're back and showered and smelling fantastic, you beam back into Liminalia, where you're awarded with Sweat for your efforts.
  
  
• You reworld Humbert, and start him doing the prescribed Workout on the Scaled Intensity Daily Board.
  
  
• You start your You doing an Intervals Training Session on the Bamboo Rower you bought yesterday.
  
  
• You jump out of the game and get on with your day.
  
  
• You get a couple of notifications from the Concierge – one when Humbert has finished his Workout Session, and the other when your You has finished their Training Session.
  
  
• When the second one comes through, you jump back over to Liminalia quick to take both Champs off their Equipments, to finalise their Sessions, and to see their results.
  
  
• Now that they're freely noodling around the Gym Between, you know you've maximised the time they'll have available to recover their Recovery. Means you're well placed to get maximum Sweat out of tomorrow's gym sesh!
  
  

So yeah: a couple of minutes, a few times a day. So long as we're nudging you towards doing movement again tomorrow, then we're doing our job,

Yes, it is (free).

No, there isn't one (a catch).

Threkka was made by one guy (me), and I've been on it full-time for over four years. I'd very much like it to make me some money at some point.

Threkka's designed such that you can benefit from everything it has to offer, for free.

Any monetisation present at launch is based around skipping time. You know you've got a 5K planned with friends, but Humbert's only at 15% Recovery? Buy some Muxels for 49p, and use some of them to buy a Supp to get him back to full Recovery, instantly.

You just want to skip to the end of this Upgrade Session, because you don't want to wait until this evening? That's cool, just use some Muxels.

Now, it's true that the price of things that cost Muxels can vary day-by-day, and maybe that's a gentle nudge by me to encourage you to buy them when they're cheap. But hey. That's just smart design.

And at launch, that's it. There are a million other directions I can take the money-making side of Threkka – Champ skins, decorations for the Gym Between, premium Supps – but for now, I just want to get Threkka out there, to prove that the idea has legs, and to hopefully pique the interest of a passing multimillionaire philanthropist or two.

Really no catch. No adverts, no prompting for reviews, no selling your data in the background (yes, if you've given permissions, then I'll grab some analytics data, but that's for understanding player behaviour, in service of making Threkka better).

I want to believe that we live in a world where if someone makes a good thing, for honest reasons, then they'll be rewarded.

It's the set of things that happens at the start of a new game or app, which hopefully get you used to what it's all about, and how to use it.

They're pretty hard to get right!

You might also see them called Tutorials or First-Time User Experiences.

Well, I kinda think that most Onboardings only get Players good at finishing that particular Onboarding, rather than having any understanding of what's actually going on: click that arrowed button, then that one, feels like I'm making progress, lovely.

Threkka's Onboarding trusts that you're paying attention. It gives you everything you need to know, but still certain steps might confuse you because of incorrect assumptions or mistakes I've made, or whatever. The general idea is that if you do struggle with a certain step, once you solve it – without big flashing arrows – you're more likely to remember it.

And also, more brutally, if you bail from an Onboarding process at the first sign of trouble, then good luck making the waaaay-harder changes you downloaded Threkka to help with in the first place 🤷‍♀️

My hope is that you'll understand a few super-important things:

• you'll recognise that fitOS is where lots of important information, features, and interactions live. And you'll understand how to go to fitOS Home, and how to invoke fitOS for information about things in the Gym Between.
  
  
• you'll understand that the interface is based on Dragon Drop. Dragging and dropping things onto other things is how you make things happen. Don't be afraid to experiment.
  
  
• you'll have learned that if you need further information about things, then both PhaseTime Calls, and this FAQ, exist.
  
  
• Threkka wants you to achieve what you want you to achieve. It's on your side.

Sure thing! Just expand each of the bits below for help.

Spoiler warning, though – there are some bits below that might be better if you run into them without having foreknowledge of them.

When you first install the game, Threkka will ask for permissions to access certain bits of your health data – primarily workout information – so it can use it to make the game work.

If you didn't give it permissions, or if something went wrong – just go to your iPhone's Settings app, scroll down until you see an entry for 'Privacy & Security':

Then tap 'Health':

Then find and tap 'Threkka':

And make sure that all the permissions it's asking for are green:

You'll get a chance to remind yourself of who you are when you first play the game. If you're feeling adventurous – shake to randomise!

After that, if you beam yourself out of the game, force a reload by closing the app (see Apple's instructions here), and restart Threkka, you'll see yourself tumbling down the wormhole to Liminalia as the game loads. Here, tap the 'customise' button to tweak your details!

Your in-game 'you' has their own mobile phone, and in Liminalia, mobiles run an operating system called fitOS.
Just tap on something in the Gym Between, and then swipe up the top edge of your in-game mobile.
fitOS will show you more details about whatever it is you tapped.
Go to fitOS Home by swiping up when nothing's selected; here you'll be able to buy things, check out Gophers, make a PhaseTime call, and more.

We think that 'Dragon Drop' is probably a corruption of 'drag and drop', the term changing as talk of the legendary power of humans in Liminalia got passed down over generations. Briefly tap and hold to pick up, and then drag and drop:

• a Champ onto You to digitise them onto fitOS.
  
  
• You onto a Champ to chat with them.
  
  
• a Champ or You onto a piece of Equipment to train, smash, or upgrade.
  
  
• a Shop item from fitOS right into the Gym Between.
  
  

And lots more!

Muxels are the Gym Between's premium currency, and they're used for fancier things. Need to instantly recover Humbert's Recovery? Spend some Muxels on an Instant Recovery Supp.

Want to skip to the end of a Training Session now now now rather than waiting until later? Pay a few Muxels to skip that pesky 'time' thing.

You'll get low numbers of them for making progress at the Gym Between, but I'm rather hoping that might give me some actual real-world money in order to buy a stock of them.

Ah, that's because I'm nice, and you can buy anything that's costs Muxels, so long as you have at least no Muxels. That means you can get a fancy whole-Squad Instant Recovery Supp, even if you've only got one or two Muxels.

All's that needs to happen is that to buy something with Muxels again in the future, you need to have gotten back to having at least none of them.

Make sure nothing's selected, and then swipe up on your in-game mobile to go to fitOS Home. Tap to go to the Equipment Shop, the Supp Shop, or the Premium Shop. Stock rotates on a daily basis. To buy something, tap and hold it to pick it up, and then drag and drop it from fitOS right into the Gym Between.

Most items cost Gold, which you'll earn and win as you beat workouts and complete challenges. Some powerful items need Muxels, though, and that's a premium currency. You can buy Muxels for real money in the Premium Shop. But – so long as you don't have a negative amount of Muxels, we'll let you spend what you need to get what you want. Just pay it back before spending more!

Tap You, and go to fitOS. You'll see that when you're selected, there are a number of Digitisation Slots shown in fitOS. To digitise a Champ, you'll need an available Digitisation Slot. Just drag and drop a Champ onto You, and they'll get digitised into fitOS. To reworld them, simply tap on You, invoke fitOS, and Dragon Drop them right back into Liminalia.

You've heard of Trophies and Achievements, right? Well, Gophers are the Threkkian version of those. Do certain things, or accrue enough time, say, training, and you'll complete Gophers and earn rewards.

I am not expecting these to localise well.

Dragon Drop Supps from the Supp Shop straight into the Gym Between, or else... get them by other means. Pick up a Supp by Dragon Dropping any Champ onto it.

That Supp will then appear in fitOS when you have a relevant thing selected. So Beast Mode, for instance, will become available when you have a Champ's fitOS invoked. It'll be greyed out if you're looking at an Air Bike.

Tap on an available Supp to activate it. Supps that affect the whole squad – say, like one that instantly recovers Recovery for all your Champs – sit with You.

PhaseTime Calls are like in-game FAQ questions, direct with the game's developer, across dimensions.

What's that? They're just fancy videos?!

...welllll, y'got me there.

So why PhaseTime Calls? Because nothing in the Gym Between – including fitOS – knows it's in a game, there's no sensible way for information about Threkka to get into Threkka.

Enter: PhaseTime Calls. By phoning Pete across dimensions, you can get information about Threkka straight from the horse's mouth.


(neigh)

It is – or at least, was – Liminalia's foremost health and fitness spot. Over the course of many millennia, though, it's fallen into disrepair. Humbert's realised that it might be just the thing that he and his ragtag bunch of misunderstood baddies need to improve their outlook, their mental health, and their lifestyles. Just the place to rediscover the spirit of threkka!

Surely the arrival of a human – there hasn't been one of those around here since the Old Times – can only bode well, right? Particularly one with such a positive go-getting attitude. Here's threkkin' hoping!

At the bottom of the screen are three main 'mode' buttons – train, upgrade, and smash. These control what happens when you drag and drop a Champ onto a piece of equipment.

With 'train' selected, and with enough Sweat, your Champ starts to train on that bit of gear.

With 'upgrade' selected, and enough Gold, they'll improve it.

And with 'smash' selected, they'll do a workout specific to that equipment – a smash! With the equipment selected, fitOS will show you what the smashes are. Complete them to unlock new variants of that piece of equipment!

Boards are home to Threkka’s main progression system. Each Board has a number of different Workouts, typically requiring several pieces of Equipment.

Daily Boards feature a different Workout each real-world day. Daily Boards are themed around the Gym Between's unique approach to fitness – Intensity, Capacity, Enduro. Ice ice baby.

Beat them all to unlock a Comp Board.

Comp Boards feature a ladder of different Workouts. Beat them all to unlock further Daily Boards, and top-level prizes – like New Member Applications, extra Digitisation Slots, and more.

Board Workouts typically use several pieces of Equipment, and whilst a Champ is taking on a Board Workout, any Equipment it uses is unavailable for your other Champs for the duration of the Workout Session.

If you keep buying stuff... yeah. But we've probably thought of that.

Supps are supplements, and over in Liminalia they can have a variety of effects. Some allow you to instantly finish sessions, whereas others will reduce the price of upgrades. Some might trigger BEAST MODE, whilst others might improve Sweat-earning potential.

After buying a Supp through fitOS, Dragon Drop any Champ onto it to pick it up. Then, depending on what you got, select the right thing (so a Champ for BEAST MODE, or You for a whole-squad Supp), go to fitOS, and tap to activate.

There are rumours of a super-special Supp out there somewhere that doesn't act quite like the others... 🤔

Each Equipment has a bunch of Workouts on it that – unlike Board Workouts – only use that one piece of Equipment. Check out fitOS for that Equipment to see what Smashes it's got. You have to beat one Smash to unlock access to the next.

The ones with a slightly different-looking Equipment in the background? Beast that one to unlock a new variant of that type of Equipment.

Each Equipment has a number of different Upgrade levels. They're cheaper than buying the next variant of the Equipment, so can be a smart way of increasing the training oomph you get from an Equipment.

There are lots of things that can improve results:

• train more to increase your Champ's Fitness.
  
  
• make sure your Champ is at full Recovery.
  
  
• find the Intensity sweet spot.
  
  
• if it's a Board Workouts – try moving the Equipment it uses closer together.
  
  

We haven't found an unpassable Workout yet, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. If you think you've found a doozy of a blocker, drop us a line at obscureFeedback.

As you progress through the restoration of the Gym Between, you might find a way of unlocking New Member Applications. Once you've done this, just check fitOS Home, and you'll see a new button. Tap it to see who's applied to join the Gym Between. Decide who you want, and then Dragon Drop them – just like a Shop purchase – into the world.

Each Champ has their own reasons for wanting to build healthy habits, so who knows – you might just find one whose worldview mirrors yours!

As your Champs train and compete, their Recovery will go down. Below a certain threshold, and much as in real life, Recovery will blunt performance – be it training, competing, or earning Sweat.

The only way to recover Recovery is to leave your Champs freely wandering around the Gym Between.

...or, spend a few Muxels on an Instant Recovery Supp 🤔🎉

Each Champ's fitness is dictated by ten fitness sub-types – like strength, cardiovascular endurance, agility, and more. As your Champs train, you'll see the impact on their subtypes, and they'll get fitter. As they get fitter, they'll complete workouts faster and be less affected by fatigue. And as they level up – say, from being a Level 2 Champ to being a Level 3 one – they'll unlock the ability to perform tougher and more technical movements.

Training in the Gym Between costs Sweat. And the only way to earn Sweat is to take Champs out exercising with you, in the real world.

So long as you have a free Digitisation Slot in fitOS, just Dragon Drop a Champ onto You to digitise them. Then tap and hold You to beam back to the real world.

Next up – capture a workout using whatever fitness app or wearable you're already using. Although Apple calls them 'workouts', they can be any sort of exercise or movement. We just want to encourage you to get out there and move around.

Once you've finished, and you've made sure that HealthKit has updated itself with the activitiy you did, just beam back into the Gym Between to see how much Sweat you can bank.

Each Champ is good for doing one workout with you. And highly recovered Champs gather more Sweat than knackered ones!

...and you'll usually find yourself in the version of reality in which they decided to you join for the one with the highest Sweat potential

During the warmup phase for any sort of Workout – be it a Board Workout or a Smash – you'll have the chance to tweak the Intensity with which the Champ'll tackle it at. It'll be set to a sensible 'best guess' automatically, but with a bit of tweaking, you might be able to get a better time.

Higher Intensity means that Champs will perform movements quicker and will be able to lift better, but they'll tire sooner.

The Intensity slider covers everything from a full-on marathon, to a hundred-metre dash. So if you can't get past a certain Workout, it might be worth playing with Intensity.

Yeah, that'll happen. If your Champ's Recovery isn't high enough, then – much as in real life – it'll affect the maximum Intensity with which they can tackle a Workout. You can ask them to go higher, but... good luck with that.

A Champ's Intensity affects the amount of time they can perform until they need to stop for a breather. As a Champ works out, their Fatigue slowly increases. Once it hits a particular level, they'll need to stop to get their breath back. If you've got Intensity just right, then they'll finish up before this point.

But if not... they might stop for a bit. And when they restart, they may decide to reduce their Intensity a little, in order that they don't knacker themselves out again.

Yeah... it is. There's a lot that goes into working out how long it might take a Minotaur to do a press-up, or how many heavy deadlifts a Yeti can do in a minute!

But somehow, it just about all hangs together.

Easiest way is to check in Apple's own Fitness app. If you're lucky, your Fitness app might already look something like this when you fire it up (make sure you have 'Summary' selected at the bottom):

If you already have a section for 'Sessions' there, and if you can see your Workout there, then you're good to go.

If you're not seeing a 'Sessions' section, you'll need to add it. To do that, scroll down to the bottom of the app and tap 'Edit Summary':

Scroll to the top and tap 'Add':

Then tap the 'Sessions' section:

Finally, choose the variant you want, and tap the 'Add Card' button:

And voila! You should now be able to see any saved HealthKit Workouts right here in the Fitness app.

In my testing, HealthKit works pretty smoothly with Apple Watch. Your real-world Workouts should appear in HealthKit very soon after you've completed / saved them.

So, using something like a Garmin watch or a Whoop! strap, things get... less magical.

Finish and save your Workout the same as usual. Now, one of two things can happen:

• Your workout should sync to HealthKit automatically after some period of time. Even if I knew what that period of time was, I wouldn't tell you what it is, because it's completely out of my hands.
  
  
• If you go to the companion app for your wearable – Garmin Connect for Garmin wearables, say – and tap into your Workout there, then that should force it through to HealthKit.
  
  

It's always worth checking HealthKit (see the first question in this section) before heading back to Liminalia to bank your Sweat. My expectation is that you'll work out a system or process that you know works for you. And that would make me happy.

It's not a situation I've devoted an awful lot of testing to, to be honest. Activity tracking works better with wearable, and I'd expect that to be the majority of use cases. But I would posit that the same guidelines apply here as they do for 'non-Apple wearables', above.

Note that, at the time of writing, I don't believe that Apple Fitness+, used by itself without a wearable, logs Workouts to HealthKit.

There are a few different circumstances under which this might happen. The three that I know about are picked up by a fitOS feature called SweatIQ, which should recognise when one of these might have happened, and give you advice. But:

• If you're using a non-Apple wearable, the data might not have synced yet. Until you have confidence in the systems at play, check to make sure your Workout is in HealthKit before attempting to bank Sweat from it. We read HealthKit when you beam your You into the Gym Between, so any problems, beam out again, check that everything's as it should be, and beam back in. We have code that should sweep up such late-sync Workouts.
  
  
• If you didn't have a Champ digitised, then you can't earn Sweat. In order to earn Sweat, you have to bring Champs over to our world, and they work out alongside you as weird little training partners. They can't do that if you've left them in Liminalia.
  
  
• If you beamed out of the game world after starting a Workout then yeah, that won't work. You need to have beamed out with a Digitised Champ before you start your real-world Workout. And you need to stop / save it before returning to Liminalia.

Drop me a line at obscureFeedback with details. Best will in the world, I'm one person, HealthKit is complicated, and Threkka sits at the interface of multiple different systems.

If you run into a use case or problem or equipment combination that I didn't foresee and that doesn't work quite properly, then you have my apologies. Talk to me. Once I know about it, I can schedule work on it.

The Gym Between Concierge is in charge of sending notifications between realms. So long as you have notifications turned on, the Concierge will drop you a line whenever a Champ has finished a Session, or when their Recovery hits 100%.

From fitOS Home, you can turn on or off specific Concierge notifications.

Megawhatnows?

Never heard of it.

I do.

2777 is my 🫶

A company called Chock Hoss made Threkka. That company is, at the time of launch, a guy called Pete. Head on over to the Chock Hoss website to learn more.

So just after I turned 40, my life hooned off in a direction I didn't see coming. Long story short: I got fit. Like, crazy fit. I junked 30kg of podge over nine months, discovered I quite liked endurance stuff, and wound up doing marathons, ultras, the 1000 Burpee Challenge (it's as bad as it sounds), you name it. Loved loved loved it.

How did I do it? I took habit formation seriously. I knew that channeling the spirit of seeing it through would be the most important thing, and so gave myself some rules to maximise my chances of getting to where I needed to be. And for a couple of years afterwards, I was convinced that there must be some way I could take a couple of decades' worth of games dev experience and make something to help people build healthy habits.

It took a year or two for the epiphanies to hit, but hit they did.

So, I cleared the decks, started scribbling on bits of paper, roughed out a design, taught myself how to code, and... well, here we are.

And it's been an absolute blast. I hope you like what I built.

I downloaded Unity.

I taught myself how to code.

And I got on with it.

Marathon, not a sprint, so I structured my life such that I could execute what I was good at, at a high level, basically indefinitely. Late nights and endless ramen ain't my bag. I know how I work well, and that's how I'll work.

It worked.

I did have some help around the edges, which you'll learn about if you manage to find the in-game credits. But for here:

• Thanks to industry legend Shahid Ahmad for endless help, support and motivation, particularly in the early days.
  
  
• Thanks to ex-Denki-fam colleague Stewart Graham for making it look pretty. I kinda wanted something along the lines of the Denki house style, so to accidentally wind up working with Stewart, a Denki OG... perfect.
  
  
• Thanks to the UK Games Fund for their flexible approach to funding UK-based games stuff. It allowed me to spend more on art that I otherwise would have been comfortable with, and for me to get a decent laptop when mine started wheezing, and crashing, and then wheezing some more.
  
  
• Thanks to the Threkka Checkers. If this goes well, I've promised them a house.
  
  

Right then, best get this thing launched, I guess?

For much of the game's development, it was called something else. But when I tried to register the trademark, some other company had a claim to one of the words I was using, so instead of spending lots of money on lawyers fighting it, I spent lots of money on lawyers to come up with a new name instead.

Turns out, coming up with a name for which you can get the dot com, and which is appropriate for the game, and which has the folklore vibe I'm after, and which looks trademarkable... isn't easy.

Lots of names came and went, including 'Codex Vitalis', 'Fitkin Folk', 'Move++', 'Halevale', and more. 'Move More With A Minotaur' was a frontrunner, up until I realised that the rhyme didn't work stateside.

Eventually, digging into old languages, I came across 'þrek', an Old Norse word meaning 'stamina' or 'endurance'. That 'þ' letter is called Thorn, and is pronounced 'th-'.

Bingo.

Tweak it a bit, and 'þrekka' – the fictional Spirit of Seeing It Through – was born.

Turns out that naming your game with a letter few people have seen before isn't a great idea, so Threkka was born.

I love it.

Could just be that it hasn't been asked frequently enough yet. Hit me up at obscureFeedback, or join the Discord.

There is! I'm not very good at Discord yet, but it exists, and if you wanna come chat, head over to this link right here.

Email, Discord... what else...

ah! Socials! Probably threkkafam on most of them. Instagram exists at the moment. Come join the fam, fam ❤️