Quick break from World making. Normal service will resume shortly.

So, as I looked at my life and noticed that I'm not getting ridiculously rich fast enough, I decided that I need to do something with it. I am going to gym, I study new things a lot (lately bioinformatics, astronomy, and cryptography, MOOCs are fun!), I help my friend with his project. But I wanted to do something to keep me motivated.

Enter gamification.

If you're not sure what that is, quick disclaimer, in my own words: It's using game stuff to make otherwise boring tasks fun. As you clean your dishes, you get experience points, when you get enough xp you level up! You may hate doing dishes, but being Level 41 Dirt Obliterator feels just cool, so you'll want to work just a bit more.

I decided to write a generic iOS/Android app that I could run on my phone, and level up in it. I took level up mechanics from Dungeons and Dragons, as they worked to get them solid way better than I ever could. This started as a really simple application just for myself with one screen, done in 30 minutes, but ended up as a bigger project. One that I'll upload to AppStore/Android Market even (for free), as soon as I'll make it pretty and robust enough (my girl is helping with art still, woo). So, without further ado, the mechanics:

1. Encounters

Each monster/group of monsters of strength equal roughly to yours that you meet while traveling is an encounter worth300 * level
experience points. I chose to assume each week counts as an encounter of your current level. At first you set your goals, say you want:

• 3 gym sessions
  
• 1 studying session
  
• 1 working on project session
  

each week. You add those, and then the experience points is divided equally between each session. If you get all or more of those, you get points assigned, for each one in each session type you miss, you get penalised. Each session type may have following kind:

• Sport
  
• Education
  
• Work/projects
  
• Food
  
• Art
  
• Entertainment
  
• Social
  

2. Levels

Levels in D&D (and thus in my app) are calculated with the following formula:
XPrequired = 1000 * (level + Combinatorial(level, 2));
So the required XP for levels are 0 for level 1, 1000 for level 2, 3000 for level 3, 6000 for level 4, etc. You look at your current XP and let the math figure out which level are you.

And the overview screen looks something like this:


It's not very pretty, but I need it done for tomorrow, when I'm at gym, so that I can start levelling up . According to my guesstimate (too lazy to calculate), it should be more than one year of training to reach level 20, which is when you're Epic Character in D&D standards, and after more than one year of sticking to the work, in mine as well.
Here's a quick video of the application working:

[youtube][/youtube]

Obviously the app needs some work done before I can release it to people (because even free apps should be of SOME standard), but I really hope that you like the idea. Will be back this week with more World In 7 Days, because I've added that to my Gamificator, so now there's no escape ;).

See you then!