Game #1: The Will Power Challenge Game of Life

I start a series of posts that will be describing various Games of Life. I will be exploring how they can improve people’s life by solving their problems but also add fun into daily activities.

The first Game of Life that I am going to describe is the Will Power Challenge Game of Life.

The Will Power Challenge Game of Life is a simple round-based card game to be played primarily on mobile devices. In the game the Player “plays” with tasks and habits.

Rationale

People, especially in the modern world, are distracted. They don’t know what they want to achieve. Or they don’t know how to achieve something. Most self-development methods and books are overwhelming because they require considerable time to plan and think before taking an action. They require a huge initial motivation in order to cross this difficulty. Majority of people fail to overcome them and don’t change.

Thus my idea of Will Power Challenge Game of Life aimed to make this start of the journey as easy as possible. Overcome initial distraction and keep the change forward. And what can be more easy than defining one and only one task to be done next day?

In practice, starting self-development means developing new, beneficial habits. And doing tasks on time, instead of procrastinating them.

My private, designer, goal was to create a simple game that can be easy to understand for people. The concept of a game that is basically about doing things in “Real Life” is not established in people’s minds. They just doubt this can work for them.

Game Goals

What player of the game will gain by playing the game? He will develop desired habits and stop procrastinating on tasks.

How is this goal reflected in the game? By using a virtual resource called Will Power. The goal of the player was to keep this resource above zero. Negative Will Power means that the game is lost. Will Power is collected by cultivating habits and by doing tasks on time - postponing them has a negative impact on the resource.

Gameplay

First player needs to select what game he/she wants to play:

The player starts with a small tutorial explaining what Will Power Game of Life is and learns the rules.

Player starts in Night Phase 0→1. This is the time of planning.

During the first night only one task can be created due to the limited number of Action Points (remember: the game is turn-based!). This drastically limits the number of possibilities in the game but also makes the game straightforward.

Here is one tricky part of the game: every new day some amount of Will Power is lost. This makes the game more challenging over time.

The Player creates a task.

And then switches from Night Phase to Day Phase.

During Day Phase the player’s responsibility is to record in the app if planned tasks were done or not. Doing them is rewarded with Will Power. Postponing them - with reducing the value of Will Power.

After switching again to the Night Phase, the task can be either closed or leveled up to Habit.

Doing a habit seven times (not necessarily in a row; seven is adjustable in settings) results in a special bonus of Will Power Points Addition. Thus finishing habits is the most rewarding part of the game.

During next night phases the player has more Action Points that he/she can spend on creating new tasks so the game speeds up.

This presents the basic game loop of Will Power Game of Life.

If the Will Power goes below zero, the game is lost:

Evaluation

The game doesn’t appear to be very engaging. The main problem is with a heavy game loop that isn’t “addictive”. This seems to be caused by congitively difficult act of tasks creation. It’s just a pain to find and write new task.

This is the most important weakness of the game but there are more issues:

• Understanding game rules. Even if the rules are quite simple, they overwhelm in the beginning because the concept of the Game of Life is too weird.

• Creating too difficult tasks: players create too difficult tasks and don’t do them because of that. The game didn’t restrain the difficulty of the task.

• Forgetting to open an application. Players just tend to forget about the app. This obviously can be fixed by adding support for push notifications.

• Lack of intrinsic game techniques. There is no social component; there is almost no surprise in the game (there is a quotation collection set, as you can notice in pictures, but it would require a lot of effort to make it engaging). Also there is not much possible strategies of playing the game (the only creative element is the creation of the task but as I already mentioned, this element is the worst part of the game)

• Doing Desired Actions wasn’t immediately rewarding. Mostly because I didn’t invest time to implement fancy animations or sound/graphical effects.

• Game difficulty is challenging to balance. For some people the game is too easy, for others too difficult - it depends on a Player self-discipline “level”.

• It’s difficult to come up with new tasks ideas during planning. This is because players forget what task he wanted to create.

• Procrastination is not penalized sufficiently. Some more difficult tasks were hanging indefinitely because the penalty for not doing them was not big enough.

• Weak feedback about Player action results. Players can check the result of the action by doing something and then reverting it. However this approach requires too many clicks/touches. The information of consequences of the action or lack of it should be more evident - best printed directly in the card.

• Lack of further leveling. Once the habit is finished, the activity no longer exists in the game. This is problematic for these activities that are of major importance for the Player. They should be repeated for a longer period of time.

• Lack of focus in the game. Task could be about anything and this is a problem because after several days there are a lot of unrelated activities. The game leads to chaos.

Potential Ways to improve

If I will come back to this game at some point I think I would take a more “hand-holding” approach: add more questions that narrow the scope of creating tasks; create a way to connect tasks with each other to decrease the chaos in the game.

The problem with the above ideas is that all of these solutions increase the initial complexity of the game. Thus my initial intention of making the game very simple can’t be met with such a gamified Todo list application!

Other Remarks

I spend too much time on implementation of the game. Some features didn’t work at all (quotation collection set visible in screenshots) or were too complicated so I had to remove them from the final version.

Summary

I described the first Game of Life. It’s not a good game but thanks to it I have a knowledge how other games should be designed and implemented to be much more efficient and enjoyable.