New Year's Resolutions: Improve Habits With an RPG | Hacker News Reader

New Year's Resolutions: Improve Habits With an RPG

ocdevel.com

29 pointslefnire34 comments

Like the concept, but the implementation doesn't really click with me. The ideal for any task-tracking system is to require as little manual overhead as possible. Typing in stuff and clicking boxes is not very appealing. The Chrome extension is a lot more interesting.

Using coins to purchase in-game rewards is a good idea. User-defined rewards, nah. Probably not.

There's too much conceptual overlap between Habits and Daily. I'd get rid of Habits entirely (who really wants "micro-tasks"?), except as an API thing.

If you want to make something exceptionally cool, integrate with RescueTime and Fitbit.

Thanks for the comment, your advice shows great understanding of the space because I've come to many of those same conclusions only after time.

Indeed, I've found very few people to use custom Rewards, I may discontinue that. The in-game rewards will become more useful when Groups is developed, so you can compete your avatars.

I've come to deem Habits indeed as useful mostly with APIs, and have considered manual Habit entry as temporary until enough services utilize the API, after which I may discontinue manual Habit-entry.

RescueTime and Fitbit are definitely on the horizon, as well as PivotalTracker, Withings, Anki, and more (see http://goo.gl/beQtz)

I actually like having my own goals. I'm not too interested in cake but I set a bunch of monetary rewards. $10 spending money, $30, $50 etc. While obviously it cost more gold to buy $30 than $10, if I save up for $30 it doesn't cost as much gold as buying $10 x 3. This is far better motivation than just levelling up in game. It's almost like going out and buying better equipment in real life I guess. I really like my rewards that way so hopefully you don't get rid of custom rewards entirely.

The store items are useful and getting to unlock them is good incentive to keep playing. I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. Keep up the good work.

Good to know! Ok, one vote for custom store - I'll make sure to get a better feel then before making any rash decisions.

Same here! Love the concept of own rewards! For example, your default rewards include 1 episode of Game of Thrones. Suppose I don't watch GoT (I do, but still, you understand the idea)? What then? Also, mit would be great if I could also specify the amount for each reward. I understand sometimes it may defeat the purpose, but still, IMHO that would be cool too

you can create custom rewards and specify custom amounts. Here's a screen of these options http://goo.gl/1T3yu

I was trying out the app and was randomly clicking on things. Wanted to see what would happen if I lost all my health.

Now it says Game Over, and forces me to buy tokens.

Isn't there some way I can reset the game? The tutorial seems woefully inadequate. I understand, you want to drive more people towards the buy more tokens for money thing, but could you implement a reset account link there somewhere?

In the works, not trying to trick ya. See https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/28

Thanks! You sir, are awesome!

no, YOU'RE

Wanted to highlight that resetting the account is possible from the death screen, thanks, but resetting does not give me any tokens (I don't even get the default tokens associated with a new account)

Also, I am a bit unclear regarding the whole rewards/tokens system. Is there any way I can get additional tokens without paying for them? To explain myself so as to not sound liek a complete cheapskate, I live in India, and the USD-INR exchange rate isn't exactly favourable.

Resetting should restore your tokens to 8, it seems to be working for other people are you sure it's not working? Tokens will be used for buying digital items, flare stuff as with Farmeville. I might come up with alternative ways to earn tokens, but for now you won't really need those items for character development anyway.

I don't have any tokens even after resetting, but no matter good sir. I shall continue to play this until the Grim Reaper has taken me. And then, I will reset it and continue playing it.

Let me take this moment to say, I have literally waited years for something like Epic Win to come to Android. Though I heard that it wasn't as Epic as promised. This seems to be the start of such a journey. May you succeed in your quest.

Hmm.. Are you running from habitrpg.com, or a locally deployed version? Live version no longer requires tokens on Continue: http://goo.gl/TnD2V . Re: Epic / Android, I hope the Kickstarter kicks! I have huge plans for Android, as well as new features on web

I am able to view the screen that you are mentioning, and I can continue and reset my account. What I am trying to say is after resetting my account successfully, I have 0 tokens left to purchase anything. My tokens don't get reset is it?

Oh, I see - you're clicking "Continue", which simply revives your character. If you want a hard reset, as in starting from scratch (deleting your tasks and restoring your tokens), which is discouraged really, you have to click "Reset" from the account dropdown top-right.

I've just got into a really good habit of using trello for everything, I look forward to this having an API so I could look into hooking the two together.

If any of you develop, Habit has very simple one-method REST: https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/wiki/API

It would be cool to have an external source of quests/bounties, such as user stories to be implemented, trouble tickets to be addressed, etc.

If you have coding chops, check out the API for that https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/wiki/API

I tried to login with facebook but got the following error message "Cannot GET /auth/facebook" then, when trying to visit the homepage I got the error "Cannot GET /"

It seems to be working again but I think I triggered an error 500

I just started seeing this too. I think I know what it is, and am trying to figure out how to go about fixing it. When someone closes their laptop or turns off their phone before closing the browser tab, it crashes the app. Something with socket.io + connect-mongo in DerbyJS, it's a new bug.

Anyway, 500 indeed - but I'm using nodejitsu/forever-monitor to restart the app when it crashes, so it should come back just fine, you'll just have to refresh and wait a bit. Thanks for pointing this out

I'm a bit confused by this. How is it an RPG? Whose role do you get to play?

You're looking at the technical definition of RPG, not the traditional. Didn't play much SNES?

I played tons of video games as a kid, and did some table-top RPGs, too! The role playing games I played all involved characters and a story.

I find with these things that failure discourages me from using the service so I fall off whatever wagon immediately, rather than recording my failure.

Any suggestions for working around that?

I would say, word all your failures as successes. (+)points for "a day without junk food" instead (-)points for "junkfood". With HabitRPG you can do that by making everything a habit with only "up" enabled - don't use dailies, and make sure your habits have "down" disabled.

Alternatively, if you find compounding failures to be the issue, you can reset your character on HabitRPG (which I do quite frequently) when you're ready to start over.

HabitRPG Kickstarter (iPhone & Android apps, website bugs & new features): http://kck.st/XoA3Yg

I really like the idea of a game designed to help you out with real life.

I am inspired to perhaps create one along these lines myself!

I Love RPG's :) but i dont like todo lists and so on.

I will give it a try maybe it can help me Organreize better :)

https://vimeo.com/13179002 epic win, similar app?

Very similar. It's a really cool app, too - had I known about it before, I wouldn't have developed C'est la vie.

Pros/Cons: * Epic is only iPhone, Habit is Web & responsive, so will work on all devices. I'm working on a PhoneGap app too. Anyway, I thought EW only on iPhone was lame, since I have Android. * EW is badge-based, and only tracks improvement. Habit is more traditional RPG-style (exp, hp, gp) and tracks both improvements and failure, so it's better for gauging actual progress. ++ for Habit: it's more real, and more comfortable for SNES RPG players. ++ for EW: you won't experience failure anxiety, as @ElliotH mentioned below.

FWIW: I'll definitely be checking out HabitRPG, and will not be able to use the other app, as I do not have an iPhone, or other smartphone.

Pretty cool!

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