Habitica is a self-improvement web application with game mechanics overlaid to help the player keep track of and remain motivated to achieve their goals. The game is laid out in the form of an RPG, in which the player collects items such as gold and armor to become more powerful. Rewards are achieved through maintaining real-life goals, in the form of Habits, Dailies and To-Dos.
Habits
In Habitica, Habits are long-term goals which are utilized to change a person's habits. These "Habits" can be set to either 'positive' or 'negative', or both. For example:
a predefined Habit is "1h productive work". This is a positive Habit: if a user has an hour of productive work, they will gain experience and gold.
a predefined Habit is "Eat junk food". This is a negative Habit: if a user eats junk food, they will lose health.
a predefined Habit is "Take the stairs". This is a positive and a negative Habit: if a user does take the stairs, they will gain experience and gold. If they don't take the stairs, they will lose health.
If a user completes a positive Habit often, it will turn green. This signifies that they are doing a good job following their Habit. On the other hand, if a user performs a negative Habit often, it will start to turn red and do increasing damage to their health. When players accrue enough experience points, they gain a level, which restores their health.
Dailies
Habitica uses Dailies to track habits that the user wants to complete in a known, scheduled, and repeatable fashion. Dailies are completed by ticking a check box: the user sets their Dailies in advance, and checks off what they have completed during their day. Completed Dailies give the user experience and gold; Dailies that fail to be completed by the end of the day result in a loss of health.
To-Dos
To-Dos are one-time tasks that can be added or deleted. When a user completes a To-Do, they gain experience. The To-Do then disappears. Unlike Habits and Dailies, To-Dos will never cause the user to lose health: the To-Do just becomes more valuable over time.
Role-playing aspect
A major part of Habitica is the role-playing aspect. A role-playing game is one in which a player takes on the role of another person or character. In Habitica, the user takes control of a character that they design themselves. The user can level up and unlock new features. However, upon death, various items and a level are lost.
Character
The player can customize their own character using various customization options such as hair, skin color and shirts. The armor and swords that a player buys when equipped also provide an attribute bonus. Some of the art in Habitica is sourced from BrowserQuest. The class system is another feature adding complexity to the role-playing aspect of Habitica. Players can choose from one of four classes, each of which have different armor available, as well as different primary and secondary character attributes that affect gameplay.
Levels
Depending on how well a player completes their Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos, they either gain experience or lose "health". When a player obtains enough experience, they gain a level, but losing all their health will cause their character to die, and be set back a level. The higher the level the player is, the more features they have access to.
Currency
When a player completes a Habit, Daily, or To-Do, they gain Gold with the amount depending on the difficulty of the task. Gold can be used to buy rewards - which can either be user-defined, real life rewards, or equipment that can give boosts in-game. Gold used to be split into Gold and Silver, with hundred Silver making up one Gold
Pets and mounts
When checking off items, sometimes the player will receive an item. The items that can be found are eggs, color potions, and food. The player can combine these to collect a set of 90 pets, which they can display beside their avatar, and 90 mounts, which their avatar can ride. Additional pets and mounts can be obtained during special events and by completing quests.
Social accountability
Players can band together in parties to complete quests. Players can also join guilds and participate in challenges made by other players, where the person with the most consistency in performing a task wins an achievement. Players can compete with friends and strangers, as well as collaborate and focus on accountability. In parties and guilds, as well as in the community-wide Tavern, players can communicate with one another via chat.
Seasonal events
There are four seasonal events called Grand Galas that happen each year in Habitica. Past Galas have involved new quests, special items such as limited edition equipment and avatar customization options, and bosses for the whole community to fight together. Other holidays, such as Valentine's Day and April Fools' Day, are also celebrated.
An official mobile application named Habitica is available for the Android and iOS operating systems. These mobile applications are replacements for the deprecated mobile apps named HabitRPG, which were released as promised after the $25,000 Kickstarter fund goal was reached.
Reception
In reviewing the site, Alan Henry wrote for Lifehacker that "while it doesn’t offer the advanced features that many other to-do apps have, it’s certainly a blast to use, and really addictive". Kelsey Adams wrote for CNET that Habitica 'had at RPG', and describes 'how much more compelling a game can be than reality to those of us whose brains are bent that way'.
History
Tyler Renelle originally created HabitRPG to help with his own habits, having been inspired by the self-help books The Power of Habit and The Now Habit. The earliest version of HabitRPG was a Google Docs spreadsheet with color-coded cell formulae. As the community of HabitRPG users grew, Renelle reached out to Siena Leslie and Vicky Hsu. Leslie and Hsu became cofounders of HabitRPG, Inc., which was formally incorporated as a company in 2014. On July 31, 2015, the website and apps were renamed to Habitica, after the land where players’ adventures take place. The change was made because some users found the name HabitRPG confusing or difficult to remember. The company name remained HabitRPG, Inc.
Community
In addition to participating in the website and apps’ social aspects, the community has been involved in helping with and improving Habitica.
Contributors
Community volunteers contribute to Habitica in various ways, such as by creating pixel art, translating text, creating music and sound effects, writing blog posts to promote Habitica, editing the wiki, resolving bugs, implementing new features, and answering new users’ questions.
Kickstarter
Starting on January 11, 2013, Renelle started a campaign on fund-raising site Kickstarter to improve development of the application with a goal of $25,000. The goal was surpassed: $41,191 was raised by a total of 2,817 people.
API
Habitica's application programming interface allows programmers to create third-party applications, extensions, and other tools that interface with Habitica.
