Tyler Renelle worked to improve himself through fitness tracking apps and budgeting apps, but never found the motivation to stick to the data-driven apps for more than a week. He felt that motivation in the real world needed to have competition or rewards, and as a lifelong gamer realized both of these incentives are abundant in role playing games. Tyler created HabitRPG as a way to meet both of those needs.
HabitRPG Promo & Team from Tyler Renelle on Vimeo .
HabitRPG is a habit tracking application that reimagines you as an 8bit avatar, tracks your habits, and gives you gold and achievements when you perform the tasks you want to perform. If you fail to meet your habits you lose hit points and can eventually die.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lefnire/habitrpg-mobile
After being featured on Lifehacker and Reddit, Renelle ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013 to beef up his servers and staff, fix bugs and launch mobile applications. The project is completely open source through Github and players can earn gold gems or status by hacking through the current code and improving the game or creating app extensions for everyone.
The social aspect of the game is also heavy, with a tavern message board where users can find people to join their party and track their progress on tasks together. Renelle hopes that ideally if users enjoy using their current data acquisition tools (astrid, Google Calendar, and fitbit are name checked in this video) that HabitRPG can integrate all of your data in one place and motivate you to keep going on all fronts.
As engineers a huge cross-section of us play video games, especially online role playing games. Being both a gamer and a nerd I'm all too familiar with the mini-rush of gaining video game levels and in-game achievements. Yes, I've tried HabitRPG and yes it seems to do a great job of causing me to keep up with my to-do list in exchange for xp and gold rewards.
An aspect of engineering and making that always inspires me is the idea that if you want something and it's not available that you can design build and make it yourself. HabitRPG follows this path in a digital form and has built up an open source community of developers and gamers in an innovative way.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lefnire/habitrpg-mobile