#042 - Habits
Here are some different types of habit trackers that you may not have heard of.
Enjoy!
1. Habits Garden
I recently listened to an Indie Hackers podcast interview with the creator of Habits Garden which inspired me to write this post.
The goal of this game is to use your daily habits to tend to a digital garden. Completing tasks earns you gems and unlocks new plants to purchase for your garden. Your garden is a 6 x 6 grid of squares where you can put your plants. There are 15 different types of plants to collect and you can use gems to buy and upgrade them.
Habits Garden requires an account to track your progress. You can complete their on-boarding without having to create an account and it will give you a feel for how the game works.
Habits garden uses a public profile with leaderboards to keep you accountable to your goals. You can chose to make a goal public so other people can see that you're staying on track.
I really like the way they show streaks in a grid with the days of the week as rows and the weeks of each month as columns in a grid. The more blocks in your grid that are filled in green the better you did. You can see an example of this in their screenshots on the app store.
Habits Garden is $9 a month of $50 a year.
2. Habitica
Habitica is what would happen if a habit tracker met an 8 bit RPG fell in love and had a baby.
You have to create an account with Habitica before you can start playing. However, once you do that you can then create your avatar. There are more options for character creation that I was expecting. You can change your characters body type, hair style, give them glasses. Then it will ask you what you're trying to use Habitica for. I picked creativity, health and exercise as my categories.
Habitica works based on positive and negative habits. Positive habits are things that you want to get in the rhythm of doing more often like working out or exercising. When you complete a positive habit you get rewards for your character.
Conversely, negative habits are those that you wish to break. If you complete a negative habit then your character will lose a bit of health and mana. I'm not sure what mana does yet since I haven't unlocked it.
You are rewarded with a few different things when you complete tasks. The main things you get are gold, experience and items. I completed my first task and found a panda egg and a potion. I then used the potion to hatch the egg and now I have a pet panda! I believe you can also level up your pet too which adds even more depth to the game.
The idea is to keep playing every day and level up your avatar. You can also earn gold for completing tasks or selling the items you've gained. It looks like you can then use the gold to buy more powerful items for your character.
Your going to need powerful items to go on quests with your friends. It isn't obvious from just downloading the app but there is a social aspect where you can party up with other characters to go on quests and fight bosses together. I think this is where this app can really shine. You could meet new friends or hang out with your current friends and keep each other accountable on your goals. I definitely recommend trying to go through every screen in this app and see all the things you can do it's too much to write about in a single post.
Habitica seems to be a pretty large community. They have third party extensions like a web extension that helps keep you off of distracting websites. They even have a public facing API for developers which is rare for a mobile app.
Habitica only has a listing for group pricing on their website which is $9.99 a month plus $3 per member. Their individual pricing starts at $4.99 a month. Then you can buy three, six and twelve month subscriptions from there.
3. (Not Boring) Habits
If you are all about design and aesthetic then I suggest you check out (Not Boring) Habits from Andy.works.
This app doesn't feel like any of the others. It is very polished like a game would be every small interaction has a presence to it. There is a lot more animation than in the previous two habit trackers I mentioned. The writing feels like how a text based RPG might talk to you it reminded me of the game A Dark Room. The app speaks words of encouragement like your being contacts to by some distant narrator. Then the visuals and the music had me reminiscing of playing Monument Valley. After completing my first task here was what it said.
You've already taken the hardest step. A voice says. You got this.
Meanwhile it showed me a 3d prism that resembles a mountain and the mountain was slowly spinning around while soft game music played in the background. As I completed the first task part of the mountain changed from a dark gray to an orange color noting that I had started my journey.
The cool thing about this company is you can get access to all of their apps for $15 a year. Check their plans page. The premium subscription is $70 a year and they send you a collectors card in the mail how cool is that?
