I love reading other people’s devlogs, and I’ve wanted to try my hand at one of my own for a while. Here Dragons Abound is a prime example of a devlog that’s given me hours of enjoyment over the years, and Randy (Thomas Randall) on YouTube is another fantastic one that I’ve gotten far too invested in following. Scott Turner, the writer of Here Dragons Abound, has a great post about Forever Projects that encapsulates exactly the kinds of project(s) that I would love to tackle personally. I don’t think that this project will be a forever project, but it is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I think it will be a fun diversion that might actually end up being a tool I’d find useful once it’s done.
I’m a huge fan of video games, specifically RPGs (even more specifically, Elder Scrolls games). I love balancing the different skills and attributes of my character to optimize for exactly the kind of playthrough I want. The idea of balancing specialization vs generalization— knowing that if you put more points in lockpick you might find better gear or ways around enemies, but that it might cost you in your next fight because you didn’t put those points into combat skills for instance.
Being the geek I am, I tend to view a lot of life through the lens of video games, and I think the idea of character progression and leveling is actually a pretty useful model for thinking about your own self-improvement. Now, this is definitely not a new idea— the idea of gamifying habit formation has been done by plenty of other apps, and I’ve tried a few of them. None of the ones I’ve tried were super compelling to me though. They offered a fairly simplistic model of improvement, where you just checked off to-do items or daily habits, and this gave you points towards an overall level, or currency to buy stuff to pimp out your character. Not bad, but it didn’t provoke the kind of skill min-maxing and prioritization that I enjoy in the games I play.
I’d like to create an app that lets you track the progress of your own self improvement and personal development in a way that’s similar to the way you track the progress of your character in a Bethesda game. Where you improve individual skills, and those skills map to attributes like strength and endurance. Except instead of improving those attributes by putting a point in them each time you level up, you instead improve the parent attributes by improving the skills that fall under each one.
But video games get one thing wrong about real life: if you don’t use it you lose it. I’m glad that in video games my skills and attributes don’t degrade if I don’t use them, but unfortunately real life doesn’t work that way. If I take two weeks off from lifting, my deadlift is probably going to feel like shit and have dropped several pounds from whatever I was doing before. If I start devoting more of my time to running, my lifting will eventually start to suffer, and vice versa. I’d like to create a simple system for tracking these kinds of things and gamifying the progression (and regression if you take time off).
I think that’s enough for this post, but in my next post I’m going to get into more detail about the nuts and bolts of how I want it to work, along with maybe some discussion of the tools and plan for how I want to make it. Maybe I’ll even actually start making the thing instead of just talking about it, who knows, crazier things have happened.