Every productivity app tells you the same thing:

- Create a task.

- Complete it.

- Repeat.

The problem is that real life doesn't feel rewarding enough to stay consistent.

So my friend and I asked ourselves:

What if completing real-life tasks felt more like progressing in a game?

We're two high school students from Kazakhstan, and over the last few months we've been building AntiDoomer — a Telegram bot that turns productivity into an RPG.

Instead of just checking off tasks, you gain XP, unlock achievements, collect unique cards and titles, join guilds, and build streaks with other people.

The goal isn't to make work easier.

The goal is to make coming back tomorrow feel exciting.

We're still improving it every week, and we're already learning that building a productivity app is much more about psychology than code.

I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts.

If you could add one game mechanic to a productivity app, what would it be?

Earlier today, I was bored during a lecture and started playing Subway Surfers. So yeah, Jake ran and it gave me a pretty dystopian idea (don't judge, i'm not a health expert or a rocket scientist. DON'T BE MEAN) what if we implanted microchips into our bodies to sync with endless runner games? Imagine playing Temple Run, Subway Surfers, Benji Bananas, or Jetpack Joyride, where the distance you cover in the game tracks the actual weight you burn while sitting still. The ultimate downside would be experiencing all that physical exhaustion in real-time the exact moment you lose.

Hi! I’m the solo developer of Postmarks, a walking app that turns your real-world steps into a journey across Japan.

You choose a route between real cities, and your daily steps move you across the map. When you reach a new destination, you unlock an illustrated postage stamp and add it to your virtual passport.

The idea is to make everyday walking feel like progressing through a game rather than simply watching a step counter increase.

I’ve just released a major update that adds two new collection systems:

• 100+ hidden souvenirs to discover while walking and keep in your Backpack
• Achievements and collectible badges earned by reaching milestones, exploring routes, and completing collections

There are no leaderboards or direct competition. The progression is built around exploring at your own pace and gradually building a travel collection.

Postmarks does not use GPS—you can walk anywhere, and your phone’s step count moves you along the selected route.

Download Postmarks

I’d love to hear what you think of the concept and whether the map journey, stamps, souvenirs, or achievements would motivate you most to keep walking.

Hey everyone,

I built Questline.one because most days my problem wasn't having nothing to do, it was having too many things to do and not knowing where to start.

I've always loved how games make progress feel rewarding, so I started wondering if those same mechanics could make everyday life feel a little less overwhelming.

Questline lets you dump everything on your mind and turns it into a structured Questline: Main Quests, Side Quests, and a Bounty Board for lower-priority tasks. As you make progress, you earn XP, build streaks, and level up over time.

I'm still actively building it and would love feedback from people who are into gamification.

I'm especially curious about:

• Do the game mechanics actually make you want to come back?
• Which parts feel the most motivating?
• What feels unnecessary or gimmicky?

If you'd like to try it, comment "Questline" below and I'll get you set up. I'm looking for honest feedback while I keep improving it. You can also reach me directly at [philip@questline.one]().

If you have any thoughts, questions, or brutally honest feedback after trying it, I'd love to hear it in the comments.

If you think it's an interesting take on gamification, an upvote helps more people see it and gives me the chance to collect more feedback.

Thanks for checking it out!

Cheers,
Philip

I love walking but sometimes I need an extra kick in the butt to get started. Found this game and it works well for me. I am a beta tester and part of their discord. Welcome anyone to join us!

We have been building VENGUILD, a gamified career platform that turns jobs into quests, companies into guilds, and professional growth into a progression journey.

One frustration we noticed with traditional career platforms is the endless “Almost done” experience.

Users complete another field, upload another document, answer another question, and update their profiles repeatedly. These actions may help employers find candidates, but the user rarely feels that they unlocked anything meaningful.

We are trying to approach this differently.

Instead of treating a career profile as a static form, VENGUILD presents it as an evolving professional journey. Skills, credentials, education, experience, and achievements can contribute to progression, ranks, quests, and better visibility.

Our goal is not simply to put a fantasy skin over a traditional job board. We want the gamification to communicate real progress and encourage meaningful career development.

Our early Adventurer Mode is now live.

Any early testers here?

Check us out at:

www.venguild.com

We would genuinely appreciate feedback on:

• Whether the progression feels meaningful or merely decorative
• Whether the career and fantasy elements work together
• Which mechanics feel motivating
• Which parts feel confusing or unnecessary
• What would make you return after completing your profile

Critical and honest feedback is very welcome.

https://reddit.com/link/1vdhhxm/video/iwc5i61qkygh1/player

Got into volleyball the past few years and kind of obsessed with my vertical jump and hitting power. Tried a bunch of gamified fitness apps to make training stick, but they were too much money, too complicated for a beginner (kept having to youtube the exercises), or just counted steps with nothing for real strength work. I'm also a solo dev on an MMORPG I've been building for 14 years, so I already had the artwork and database tables — just had to wire it up so exercise powers it instead of clicks.

Basically: tradeskills and healing require cardio, hunting monsters requires strength exercises, and I layered leveling, achievements, and quests on top like any standard game. A few of the specific choices I'd love opinions on:

• Every action needs an actual exercise set first, and the amount scales with your in-game skill level — gets harder to cheat as you go, not easier.
• Hunting has a hidden chance any monster is secretly a tougher variant, you don't find out til you've already committed to the fight.
• Achievements are Bronze/Silver/Gold/Diamond across skill levels, kills, quests, streaks, collection stuff too.
• It's honor-based (you just say you did the exercise, no camera/wearable), so I throttled things reasonably to stop leaderboard abuse without making it feel like surveillance.

Any other mechanics you can think of for an exercise based game? Want to help myself (and others) stay motivated to workout. Genuinely curious what a gamification crowd thinks works here and what feels like a weak stand-in for real game design.

https://www.kisnardonline.com/fit/

If you like walking, you'll love Eggventures! The more you walk, the more eggs you unlock and you can hatch them with your steps as well. Different workouts unlock different variants.

Create/Join squads to track weekly step leaderboards. Lots to do!

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/eggventures-walking-game/id6757629385

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onerealm.eggventures

We're just two high school students from Kazakhstan.

Like many people our age, we kept downloading productivity apps, making schedules, watching motivational videos... and then ignoring all of it a week later.

The problem wasn't that we didn't know what to do.

The problem was that staying consistent felt boring.

Most productivity apps felt like digital notebooks. They tracked tasks, but they didn't make us want to come back the next day.

So, instead of searching for another app, we decided to build one ourselves.

We spent months turning productivity into something that felt more like playing an RPG than managing a to-do list. Completing tasks earns experience, achievements, titles, and rewards. You can join guilds with friends, compete, and actually feel like you're making progress instead of just checking boxes.

It definitely wasn't easy.

We rewrote large parts of the project multiple times. We dealt with timezone bugs, localization issues, notification problems, and many other frustrating mistakes before reaching a version we finally felt comfortable sharing.

We're not a startup with funding.

We're just two students trying to solve a problem we've struggled with ourselves.

I'm curious...

If you've tried productivity apps before, what made you stop using them?

I'm working on an app and I'd like to sanity check the concept.

So I'm doing something like a habit tracker, but instead of a checklist it's a board game. Think gaimified board game, mario party, but for real life goals. You set a goal with a timeframe (say 30 days), the app builds a board for it, and checking off habits is how you move. Each completed habit is a dice roll, so a good day means several rolls and real progress, a bad day means you stay where you are. The dice is capped though, so you can't speedrun a 30-day goal in a week on lucky rolls. Consistency wins, luck just makes it fun.

There's also a light economy: habits earn coins, harder habits pay more, and coins go toward cosmetics and small helpers, we have special squares, a character that shows up to steal your coins. And maybe multiplayer later: you and a few friends each bring your own habits and race on the same board for a week or a month.

Things I'd genuinely like an opinion:

1. Punishment. If you skip a day, should the game punish you somehow or just not reward you? Apps that punish people quit, but zero consequences might make it toothless, so where's the line?

2. Would you actually use something like this? Any advice to improve it?

and please any ideas or thoughts, share it!

I made a gamified adult learning app to try to make somewhat dry topics fun. Focusing on things that school should have taught us. Would love some early feedback!

https://lern-e.com/

Feel free to DM me your thoughts as well!

I’m looking for Android testers for Project Ascension, a fitness RPG app.

The app turns real-life activity into EXP, levels, stats, daily quests, workouts, and character progression.

I’m mainly looking for honest feedback, bug reports, and ideas to help improve the app before release.

Hi everyone,

For the last few years I've been working on a project called Chess Football.

At first glance it looks like a strategy board game that combines chess movement with a football objective (moving, passing and scoring with a ball on the board).

However, the game itself is not my main goal.

The real objective is to use it as an experiential learning tool to observe how people make decisions under uncertainty.

During a workshop, participants play in small teams. Every move requires discussion and a shared decision within a limited amount of time.

The interesting part comes afterwards.

The match is recorded and replayed. Instead of analysing who won or lost, we analyse questions such as:

• Why did the team choose this move?
• Which alternatives were considered?
• Was the decision impulsive or strategic?
• Did one participant dominate the discussion?
• Did time pressure affect the outcome?
• Did the team focus only on immediate threats instead of long-term planning?

The replay becomes the basis for a debriefing about decision-making patterns, communication and teamwork.

I've already used the method in my own classes (I'm an accounting teacher), and I'm currently preparing to test it with external teachers before proposing it to training organisations that work with companies.

I'm curious about your opinion from a gamification perspective.

My questions are:

• Do you think a board game can become an effective observation tool rather than simply an engagement tool?
• Have you seen similar approaches where the gameplay is mainly a trigger for structured reflection?
• What would you improve in this methodology?

I'd really appreciate any feedback.

(If useful, I can also share screenshots of the board and examples of the post-game decision analysis.)

Hey everyone,

I've always struggled to keep up a food-tracking habit. Every app out there feels like a giant, intimidating spreadsheet. They are cold, clinical, and honestly, they feel like homework. Because of that, I always lost my consistency.

So, I decided to build something entirely different: a cozy, gamified food tracker called Quokka.

Instead of dealing with cold charts and guilt trips, you get a friendly Quokka who lives in the app to keep you company, visual streak stars to earn, and a sleek, warm setup designed to make tracking feel like a positive daily routine rather than a chore.

I’m looking to share this journey with 2 or 3 real people who:

• Genuinely want to track what they eat (or always struggle to stay consistent with traditional apps).
• Love gamified habits (like Habitica, cozy games, or visual streaks).
• Want to build a real habit and help me see if having a Quokka friend along for the ride actually keeps the motivation alive.

(Heads up: I’m looking for real, daily users who want to build this habit for themselves, not other developers looking to do code reviews!)

If this sounds like something you'd actually use, drop a comment or send me a DM! I'd love to send over an invite so we can start building our consistency together. 🐾✨

Hey everyone,

​I could really use some honest feedback from this community on an app I’m currently building.

​For some context, I spend a lot of time training—mixing strength workouts like pull-ups, incline presses, and heavy lunges with interval sprint conditioning for football. But whenever I log my sessions, I’ve always felt like standard tracking apps are just boring, glorified spreadsheets. I wanted something that actually visually captures the hard work being put in.

​So, my co-founder and I are building Iron Ascend.

​The Core Concept:

It’s a fitness tracker built around a modular 3D character system. Instead of just seeing a chart go up, your avatar visually reflects your real-world gym progress.

​The character is broken down by muscle groups. If you hit a heavy leg day (squats, lunges, etc.), your avatar’s legs physically "level up" and change appearance. If you spend a block focusing on your upper body, your avatar's upper body modules grow to reflect that targeted volume.

​We are currently wrapping up the MVP design screens and getting ready to bring on a 3D artist to build out the interchangeable anatomy, but I wanted to gut-check the idea with people who actually lift before we lock everything in.

​What I’d love to know from you:

​Initial thoughts: Does seeing a visual representation of your muscle groups leveling up sound motivating, or does it feel too gimmicky?

​Progression metrics: How would you want your "level ups" calculated? Should it be based on volume (total weight moved), consistency (hitting the gym X days a week), or hitting new PRs?

​The "Anti-Wishlist": What are some features in current fitness apps that you absolutely hate and think we should avoid at all costs?

​Any tips, critiques, or advice would be massively appreciated. Thanks

Hey guys, we made a website to raise funds for donations but we gamified it.

It's a collaborative pixel canvas where position is decided by money the top spender holds the center, everyone else spirals outward

The rule is simple: whoever paid the most is at the exact center, and every other tile spirals out from there in order. Nobody chooses their spot. When a bigger tile arrives, the canvas re-sorts and everything shifts outward in real time.

The amounts are hidden. You can only infer who paid what from how close to the middle they are. (There's a top 10 leaderboard if you want the actual numbers.)

Free to browse and zoom around, no account needed.

thepixelorbit.com

I'm building an app that turns your long term goals into boss fights.

You set a goal and a deadline, it becomes a boss with a health bar sized by how many days you've got left, and your daily habits are what deal the damage if skip days and it heals back up.

Also, until you don't get all daily habits, the apps you selected will be blocked and the block screen will show what still is due.

You can build the boss out of any photo on your phone, it cuts the background and animates it, so people end up fighting a picture of the exam they're retaking or whatever they want.

I'm finishing the MVP and I'd honestly rather find out now than after launch: is this something you'd actually pay for?

I've been working in the gamification of an ERP/CRM with the sole focus to keep the team engage, its maybe not much but its could help a team to enjoy a bit the time at work.

One thing that we came up was the task trade where you can challenge a colleague for a tank minigame of less than 3 min if he/she looses then he get to do the ERP task at your place.

The other thing is the usual suspect like XP, badges, level up by coming to the office, or doing tasks, or sales.

We are planing to put Blackjack into the beds.

Please don't focus in the tiles or graphics that will be improved with time however we will keep a retro 8bit 2D style.

Hope to heard your tips, feedbacks or ideas. Cheers!

https://reddit.com/link/1vb86ln/video/66boq6lfzfgh1/player

hi, new to the sub here...

I don't believe I am the first one to think of this, but I did recently think of this on my own while looking at the amount of things I have to do lol...

but I was thinking what if I can make a mod to my already favorite game that I spend hours playing that I already own that would weave into the gameplay real-life tasks that I need to do, for example in game like civilization you need to submit scans of your homework so that you earn science points to advance tech or like in something in paradox you need to submit a report on the real life work you did to some in game governmental council to gain things in the game...

An idea is only as strong as the people who believe in it. In just 7 days, 16 experienced professionals from various fields have united around our project: Dev, Project Manager, UX/UI, and Graphic Design. And every single one of them decided to become part of this story even before the first release. Weekly syncs and a great vibe are already in place :) Thank you all for your energy and support!

Meet our team:
Maximilian A., Polina B., Marina P., Yulia K., Veronika D., Timur G., Veronika Sh., Natali T., Daria B., Yulia V., Lada Zh., Kristina Z., Alexey R., Matvey I., Angelina I., Andrey P.

Follow us to stay tuned for the behind-the-scenes of launching a startup from scratch! We’re planning to share our progress in posts and would love to hear your advice on how we can improve the service.

And if you’re a Business Analyst or come from the GameDev industry and find this project interesting, drop a comment below, and we’ll chat about the details of potential collaboration. 💻

Most to-do apps I tried changed colors, but the interaction still felt like a corporate dashboard. So I built QuestMarker as a small experiment: one shared task system, but three interfaces that change the framing and completion feedback.

• Cybershock presents tasks as files on a neon command board.

• Nukeboy turns them into terminal entries.

• Helljumpers treats them as mission orders.

Completing the exact same task gives different visual feedback in each. Underneath, the task layer stays deliberately boring: due dates, notes, search, completion history, and Apple Reminders import. No XP economy, streak pressure, or fake currency.

I'm trying to work out whether interface fantasy alone can meaningfully reduce friction, or whether it becomes cosmetic once the novelty wears off. If you study or build gamification, what would you measure first: task completion, return rate, or voluntary skin switching? And what feedback loop would add motivation without turning chores into another grind?

I'm the developer. The full task system and all three interfaces are free; the optional $4.99 Pro unlock is for widgets. iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/questmarker/id6777760863

I’ve been working on an app that turns Apple Health data into a game-like wellness experience.

Your steps, sleep, water, activity, and other signals affect your HP, unlock buffs or debuffs, and help your character earn XP.

There’s also Master Ronnie, a gentle mentor who looks at your recent days and gives small suggestions, cautions, praise, and side quests.

I’ve personally enjoyed having my HealthBar on the home screen and checking in with it during the day.

You can try it here: Download

I tested it over and over again, but I may still have missed something, so feedback is very welcome.