DoQuest

A gamified task/habit tracker written in C#. TUI (Terminal User Interface) via Terminal.Gui, and persistence by SQLite.

What does this do?

The current goal is to provide a quick and easy interface for logging a task with an arbitrary “score”, like this:

Do mobility workout 10

The app then keeps track of your cumulative score, and awards you new “levels” as you hit certain score thresholds, as though this were a video game (this one, specifically 🐉⚔️).

What will it eventually do?

(Boring grownups call this section the “Roadmap”)

I’d like to add...

• Treasure: A set of (procedurally-generated, probably) items that you’ll get rewarded for entering tasks, in addition to points, e.g. “Unusual Ruby of Wizard’s Artifice” (yes, I played a lot of Diablo back in the day, why do you ask? 👹)
  • ⚙️ Work in progress!
• Character “Classes”: I’ve always liked the mechanic (in games like Pokemon or Ogre Battle) where your character can “evolve” into a more interesting character class as they progress, e.g. “Adventurer” to “Wizard” to “Fire Magus”.
  • Figure out whether classes should be pickable on level up, or just assigned randomly (taking into account factors like character level and loot).
• Support for multiple “characters”.
  • The simple way: when you get your “character” to, say, Level 100, the app just starts a new one for you, and that character gets the points from now on.
    • ⚙️ I’ve built the foundation for this (having multiple characters with one flagged as “current”) but no logic yet for handling “retirement”.
  • The more complicated way: The app can keep track of the “progress” of multiple “characters” at a time, and let you switch between them when you add a task, if you want to.
• “Quests”, i.e. tasks that the app will keep track of for you, and then you can log that you’ve completed them, or perhaps completed part of them.
• History/Milestone log: A view that shows what tasks you entered on each day, and also when you hit certain “milestones”, like Reached Level 5! or Got Rare Diamond Axe!
• Deployment: A person who isn’t me should be able to easily download, install, and run this thing.

Why would you want to do that?

I don’t know about you, but my neurodivergent brain does not like simply “doing things” it’s “supposed to” be “doing”.

Even if I genuinely want to do those things!

I’ve played around with various ways of conditioning myself into habits—peanut butter M&Ms¹ are a pretty good tactic—and this is my latest: giving myself “points” for completing regular and irregular tasks might encourage me to do so more often.

Aren’t there already lots of apps that do this and have additional advantages, like they run on your phone?

Yes, but:

1. Most of them have obnoxious payment dynamics, as the economics of the app stores unfortunately demand.
2. More importantly, I’m a software developer and sometimes you just want to develop your own software... else what is life for?

Footnotes

1. Not peanut M&Ms, peanut butter M&Ms, the ones in the orange bag. They’re my favourite. I eat them like candy. ↩