Dissertation project that explored a gameified app's effect on sleep cycles

Fish and Sleep is a gamified sleep assistance app that uses catching and raising fish to incentivise you to wake up and go to sleep. It was created as part of my dissertation at the University of Birmingham alongside a report which you can read here: . The dissertation was awarded a first.

You can only catch fish for 10 minutes after you wake up so make sure you’re up on time to catch them! Raise your fish in the aquarium, feed them different foods to grow their size and change their colour. Fish hate bright lights, using your phone past your bedtime will upset them so go to sleep to keep them happy! Fish and Sleep tracks the times you were asleep giving you a comprehensive list of when your phone was active.

Game Background

By my third year of University, I had grown far more interested in game development than Computer Science and wanted to focus my dissertation on this area. Any game created would need to be paired with a scientific study, therefore, I decided to investigate a video game’s effect on sleeping patterns. A flawed experiment left evidence of the app’s effect null, but I believe the research and aims of the project show an area that can be explored more.

I learned a lot about Android development and mobile development in general. Creating the game itself was straightforward, but the aims of the project required interaction with a phone’s inbuilt features such as; detection of user activity, time management, notifications etc. I’m happy that I was able to use my dissertation to further my game development goals while still achieving a first-class degree.

I’d also like to thank my supervisor Dr. Alexander Krull for his assistance on the project.