Throwdown Champs
exercise your demons
Welcome to Liminalia
Unexpectedly finding themselves plunging down a wormhole twisting its way through time and space, our players soon meet a frustrated thespian Minotaur called Humbert, and start to help him rebuild the Liminal Gym – formerly Liminalia's premier health and fitness spot.
And so the scene is set for Throwdown Champs. It's a free-to-play gym builder / management game, but... one with a bit of a twist.
...nyaaactually, scratch that, it's quite a big twist.
It'll give you more life.
Reality Swapsies
To get the Liminal Gym back to its former glory, players need to help their in-game Champs earn Gold to buy and upgrade equipment. And they get Gold by taking on and beating a series of tougher and tougher workouts. And to get fit enough to do that, they need to train. And training costs Sweat.
Only way to earn Sweat? Take your Champs out training in the real world.
With you.
Lifespan++
Throwdown Champs solves 'games do fitness'. Leveraging 20+ years of games dev experience, plus one real-life self-driven journey from bulk to hulk, Champs torpedoes itself into heretofore unexplored market territory with a player-centric framework that takes data from the apps that our players are already using and knits that data together into healthspan-lengthening lifestyle change.
...it just so happens to do it with a motley crew of misunderstood baddies from folklore and pop culture, interdimensional PhaseTime calls with the guy that wrote the game, and an increasingly pissed off unicorn called Ray.
Play the Long Game
And as our players – and their Champs – grow and develop, so will the Liminalian multiverse. Gentle monetisation – which'll likely take a while to get optimised, right enough – will allow the core concept to grow and develop. Stuff like new Champs, new Equipment, and new Supps, are all relatively simple no-brainers.
But new customisation options? Multiplayer throwdown weekenders? Interdimensional plumbing linking up the Liminal Gym and real-world ones? Countless new sports? Yes, yes and yes again.
It's all to play for. If it happens in the real world of health, fitness and exercise, then it happens in Throwdown Champs.
Founder
chock hoss boss
Pete Morrish
Hey. So I've been working in games for 25ish years. Mainly in Production and Design – highlights include a seven-year stint as Production Director at Slightly Mad Studios, where I was pivotal in shipping the mighty Project CARS2, and a shorter one up at Denki in Dundee as a Product Architect. Plus Climax, Kuju, Creature Labs; a veritable who's who of the UK games industry.
With a background in psychology and ethology, I've always championed user-centric design; always strived to design interesting things for the end user, rather than just games for people that already like games.
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 it 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.