I spent about ten years using Trainerize. Now Infitnite® has officially moved away from Trainerize and Xperiencify into our own app, where I can build the fitness and role-playing experience I originally had in mind.
For years, I was building Infitnite around other people’s platforms. Now I get to build the platform around Infitnite.
If you’re discovering Infitnite for the first time, it’s a Fitness Fantasy RPG: a role-playing game built around your real-life fitness and personal development. The challenge has always been making those two sides feel like they belong together.
Trainerize, a platform for delivering fitness coaching, supported the training side of earlier versions. Xperiencify, a platform for learning experiences with game-like progression, helped support the game side. Those were the tools I used to start bringing the idea to life.
I’ve already covered how those two parts came together in From Two Apps to One. But I want to explain why I needed to make this move, because the number of apps on your phone is only part of it.
Ten years with Trainerize wasn’t time wasted
When you spend that long working with a platform, you learn what you can build with it. You also begin to understand where your own ideas ask for something different.
For years, I had a vision for Infitnite that I couldn’t fully create myself. I wrote about that in The Fitness App Problem No One Talks About: I didn’t yet have the resources or skills to build the app I wanted, so I used existing platforms and built around them.
I’m carrying what I learned from both platforms into Infitnite.
Leaving them doesn’t mean dismissing that experience. Those earlier versions were how I got to work on this idea before I could build the app itself.
But I was trying to create a particular kind of game. The further I wanted to take it, the more the limits of those platforms shaped what I could actually offer you.
The kind of experience I wanted to build
Take learning a skill.
I think about it like learning an instrument. You can develop the habit of picking up a guitar for thirty minutes a day. That matters. But learning chords, reading music, and being able to tune the guitar are different things. You can show up regularly and still need help learning a particular technique.
That distinction matters to me in fitness, too. I want Infitnite to help you discover things you want to learn, give you a reason to practice them, and make that development part of how you play.
Imagine finding a technique while doing something you already enjoy, getting curious enough to learn about it, and then choosing to work on it. The value goes beyond discovering another thing in a game. You could develop an ability you continue using outside the app.
That’s the kind of connection I want to build. And it takes more than deciding what to call a workout or what reward to give someone for finishing it. I need to be able to shape how you find something, how you learn to use it, and what happens when you do.
I couldn’t take that vision as far as I wanted within the platforms I was using. Building our own app gives me room to work on those details directly.
Your feedback has somewhere to go
A player posted in the Warrior’s Circle, our in-app community forum, about confusion using the Constellarium, the area where you explore and manage skills.
That feedback brought us back to a bigger question: were skills actually doing the job I’d imagined for them?
It wasn’t enough for the feature to exist. Players needed to understand how to engage with it. That conversation helped shape the work on how skills are presented and used, including the experience of navigating the map itself.
This is what excites me about having our own app. When you tell me something feels confusing, I can look at changing that experience. Your feedback can affect the design, rather than only the explanation I give you about how to use it.
There’s responsibility in that, too. Owning the app doesn’t make every idea easy to build, and it definitely doesn’t mean everything works perfectly. If you’ve been playing since launch, you’ve seen some of the things we still need to get right.
I’m grateful to the people who’ve taken the time to show me where they got stuck, as well as the people telling me what they’re enjoying. Both help me understand what the next changes need to accomplish.
Where Infitnite goes from here
I want to keep developing the fitness and game sides together. That means paying attention to whether something helps you learn or train, and whether it makes sense as part of the experience you’re playing.
There’s still a lot I want to build. But I can now work on Infitnite itself, with the lessons from those earlier versions and the feedback from the people using it today.
If you knew Infitnite through Trainerize or Xperiencify, this is where I’m taking that work next. And if you’re new here, you don’t need to know the history to join us.
