The gamified life

I did a lot yesterday with Claude Fable. I added new features to my Lifelog Dashboard (including a notifier), and put together a working app that combines a task manager with a sprite-based sim ala Stardew Valley.

Lifelog Dashboard
First of all, my Lifelog Dashboard now has notifications that trigger if I don’t post to Lifelog before certain deadlines. That was a pain. I can see why Lifelog itself doesn’t have notifications. The browser and OS try to kill any notifications, even if you explicitly accept them.

I also made a dashboard for my project workspace, and used a python script to split all my Lifelog posts into individual Markdown files. I fed it the downloaded CSV file, and it spat out 1700 files faster than I could depress the ENTER button.

Care Taker, Home Edition
I’m most proud of my gamified task manager. What if Trello and Harvest Moon had a baby?

On the main screen you define rooms, objects in those rooms, and tasks associated with the rooms or objects.

Bedroom -> Laundry Basket -> Wash Laundry.

Over a specified time these tasks become due or overdue, and are either marked done or snoozed. At this point it’s a basic to-do list that refreshes jobs to be done. I wrote about this part of the app last week.

But, now you can hit the Sim tab, and the app will render your task list as a series of pixel art rooms. At first the rooms are just walls, doors, and boxes representing the objects. The system renders them according to simple rules. But you can also edit the rooms, changing their shape and size and adding the objects to them to match your actual home layout. It becomes a mini version of your own life. (Or maybe your child’s life.)

The objects are set up to have multiple stages. The fern wilts. The laundry basket fills up. The desk gets cluttered. So as the tasks get closer to their due date, it shows up in the environment. Once you mark the task done, either on the list, or in the game screen, that object returns to its original done state. The watered fern turns green and lush. The trash can lid closes shut again.

If you need a new icon for a tile or a room, there’s an editor for that. You define a set of pixel art images for each object. But I’ve found Fable 5 can generate decent images on its own. My goal now is to map out my house, my yard, and garage little by little as I add tasks to the tracker.

And even though I can just click done on the task list, I find it’s more fun to navigate my avatar around the rooms to the object because I can see the mess go away. I’ve basically gamified my life.