Habitica

Self improvement is rarely glamorous or fun, but Habitica helps drive you to reach your objectives by marrying your to do list to a persistent roleplaying game. The people who built Habitica know that people are more likely to establish and maintain healthy habits when they have positive motivation to do so, and that's why they've built a colorful game world that provides virtual short term and long term rewards for engaging in positive activities. Unlike more traditional roleplaying games, the challenges you'll face in Habitica are entirely of your own creation. After creating an avatar, you'll be directed to create tasks to complete. Habitica seeks to help you with short term and long term habits, both positive and negative, and in pursuance of that, activities are split up into three different categories. Habits are recurring and non-scheduled activities. They can be positive, like eating more vegetables, or negative, like smoking a cigarette. To-dos are specific activities you need to accomplish once or rarely, and may constitute activities like filing your taxes. Dailies cover the daily habits you're looking to build in your life, and they serve as the most common core component of the game. Together, all three of these different activities serve as the core of Habitica's gameplay loop. Completing positive goals on time earns your avatar experience and gold. Missing your deadlines or engaging in negative habits costs your avatar health. What turns Habitica into such a strong tool for productivity is that it makes you invest in your avatar. The pixel art is cute and highly stylized, resembling a modernized twist on retro fantasy games, and you have a great amount of leverage in how you choose to customize them. Earning experience and gold gives you access to more clothing, weapons, and accessories with which to outfit your avatar. Habitica cleverly spaces out the features available to players. A few levels in you'll unlock mounts and pets, and proceed further still to tie your character to a specific class. It's an easy system to get hooked into, and the more you play, the easier it is to get invested in the adventures of your digital avatar. But adventuring alone can be as lonely as trying to reach your goals by yourself. Habitica offers a wealth of social features to provide you the motivation to more effectively complete your tasks. The Tavern allows you to socialize with friends and strangers, and you can even join groups letting you connect to people with similar interests and goals to your own. The late level game allows you to form parties with other avatars, basically combining everyone's objectives into a single quest that rewards everyone for reaching their goals together. Habitica may seem a silly notion at first, but once you get hooked, it's a great excuse for self betterment. The system draws you in with its cute graphics, keeps you playing through its drip feed of new clothes and equipment, and maintains that commitment by creating a system that encourages cooperatively pursued good habits.