What would you need/want in a Chore/Habit Management Tool?

Hm… okay, from your response here it occurs to me that I might not have been 100% clear what sort of thing I’m making here. So let me explain!

I mentioned in my first post about ChoreWars and Habitica, but I didn’t directly link them yet in this thread - and that’s something akin to what I’m building. Doing tasks isn’t something you actually do in-game (though I have played with the idea of something Stardew Valley-esque, where the player’s cleaning in the real world is abstracted into something like cleaning weeds out of the fields), it’s the way you as a player interface with the game which is going to be layered over the top of the task/habit system. Basically, my goal is to make a game where you are rewarded for doing real-life, real-world things which aren’t necessarily pleasant to do via in-game reward systems.

Optimally, I intend to iterate towards a system which uses the psychological hacks associated with dark patterns in games - time gates, daily quests/logging rewards, and so on - to motivate self-improvement behavior instead of buying whatever in-game currency allows for the next gacha pull. That… probably won’t be the first game I make. The first one’s probably going to be quite linear, and mostly built around “do items on your to-do list to advance a storyline.” But that’s my goal, and I plan to get there by building ever-more-complicated games over the top of the core chore/habit tracker base.

This is to say… there isn’t necessarily a way to list the pros and cons of the actions, because you accomplish them by actually doing them. If the action is “mop the floor,” the pro is… you mopped the floor. In your own home. Clean floor! And by reporting that you did so, you get something from the game. The con is… you had to mop the floor. In real life.

Obviously, this is a style of game which depends strongly on player buy-in. You could just… lie. But that’s no different than people using save editors to modify their files on other Twine games, or the console in Ren’Py. People cheat through the grind in games all the time. My goal is to make the “grind” be things that the players consciously decide that they should be doing, like chores or personal projects or self-improvement/self-care actions, so that the game can nudge them towards that desired action with a structured reward system. Think of it like… doing chores to earn your allowance, but your allowance is paid in sexy.

That’s why I’m looking for more things that people would actually put on their own personal lists of chores, so I can make things more universal. If you don’t take daily medications, or don’t struggle with remembering to take them, having that on a list of things for you to do is pointless and doesn’t help you reinforce a desired behavior. As soon as I get a good list (and @BadIdea4, your ideas are great contributions!) I intend to make a starting set-up system where the player chooses what they need to work on and set how often (daily, weekly, monthly, or just “eventual goal”) they want to be doing it.

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