Habitica's creator here. My new project, Gnothi, merges light-gamified Fields tracking with AI entries that weave your real life into an ongoing novel - a genre you pick, that you stay the author of. Self-authorship over your own story.
Habitica creator here (not with Habitica anymore). My new project is Gnothi.
If Habitica is your habits-based DnD campaign, Gnothi is a Dungeon Master writing the campaign, and you pitch in - through writing and Fields. A concept called "Self Authorship": you stay in control of your own story, and you can use it as a pure creative-writing aid or a literal DnD campaign tool. That idea threads through everything below.
I call it Fields (instead of habit-tracking) because it's more general now - it includes Data & note-taking.
Power-tools: keyboard shortcuts, due dates, file-uploads, complex reset-periods (n times per week), pomodoro-timers, focus-mode, and more.
You decide what's scored (gamification) and/or analyzed (PCMCI). Mix-n-match attributes for a hyper-custom, use-case style. Eg, I don't use the ToDos column; I have a Daily called "ToDos" with complex organization.
The Causal Graph also emits a text snippet (like the morning-run example above) that gets rolled into your Story, below.
The crown-jewel of Gnothi isn't the Fields, it's the entries. "Today my boss yelled at me, blah blah" or "Costa Rica was great, I surfed with Tim" or "Poetry Chapbook Entry #1: Namer. The mountain peak is...". You can AI-chat any entry: "Gnothi, any advice on this poem? Gnothi, write this dream as a scene."
But the magic is what happens when your entries and fields combine - Stories.
An ongoing story that integrates your life through metaphor - your Entries & Fields, combined. The Alchemist, personalized and steerable. Here's a passage from my own Story, "Namer":
"I smelt the smoke and the drink on you under the road-dust," Beibin said. "A man who can't feel his own valley will light a fire in his belly to feel something - I know the trick of it. I'll not tell you to put it out today. I'll tell you to count it. Tonight, when you reach for it, you'll know the number, where you didn't this morning. That's a small descent too. Knowing the number's the start of feeling the fire."
And here's how Chapter 2 closes - the witch Bébinn and Vael climbing back up the valley toward a far, warm window:
"You can't think your way to the answer. It's not in your head, and your head is where you've lived so long the air's gone thin. You'll only find it the way you find the floor of any valley." She did not look back at him. "One step. Then another. Toward something warm you didn't put there to be chosen by - only to sit near, because you'd rather be warm than cold."
Vael looked at the far small fire in the window. He did not, yet, feel where the wanting-of-it lived in him. He could only name that he wanted it. But he took the step. And then another.
So it does 2 things: (1) takes your entries and does a story-book conversion (you specify the genre, the style, etc); and (2) rolls in your causal-graph factors, past-due ToDos, poorly-managed Dailies, etc.
It doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be any genre (scifi, adventure, etc). Or even nonfiction (creative-writing aid, learn-Python tutor, etc).
Stories maintain 3 things, and you maintain 1:
...unless you want to take charge. You're in control of your own story - use it as a pure creative-writing aid, a DnD campaign co-author, or just to stay the author of your own story. Write an entry like "Jane called, we fought... oh hey can you kill off Aegwyn? And bring in a band of gnomes. Anyway, Jane...". Or, to really take the reins, edit the Arc directly. This is your story. And if you're using this for literal DnD (drafting your campaign), then definitely edit the arc.
The bit Habiticans care about: it's not just your entries, but your fields that factor into the story. A missed Morning Run [-1] becomes "Vael lingered in the high tower again, the trail down to the valley untrodden. And he knew..."
There are 2 modes:
In DnD land, it's the difference between the DM asking questions and having you roll (theme-building), vs monologue story-telling (world-building).
You can share entries with each other, with 3 privacy tiers:
So... sharing with a partner. I write about Jane. Jane writes about me. Jane shares with me (say, privacy=sensitive).
Jane would have become a character in my story anyway. But now, her character's nuance is offset by Gnothi's understanding of her own perspective. The story has details I didn't even know about - and never will! I'll only know the surface expression of a character creation that was more nuanced than the cartoon I had in my mind.
The whole gang can get in on this. Y'all all share with each other - now you're all stories in each other's campaigns. Habitica removed Guilds; Gnothi brings it back as Groups, and it'll be more powerful: entry sharing (commenting, etc), fields sharing (accountability), stories sharing (we're all characters in each other's).
That's all built; soon I want to add video-chat & scheduling - eg if you want to use this for campaigns, or accountability. And group match-making happens via user.entries[].embeddings.mean() <cosine> group.members[].embeddings.mean(). So you don't have to hunt for groups - they sort by AI magic.
My umbrella company OCDevel (Habitica was once a DBA) is where I throw experimental stuff. One project is a podcast generator: type in a topic you're interested in - news, tech, philosophy - and it creates daily episodes, with voice-cloning.
You can plug Gnothi into OCDevel Podcaster and listen to your story doing chores. I'll paste a sample in my voice soon, but I don't use my voice for my stories - I prefer English voices. Clone your own. Then subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Antennapod (Android).
Sit, Namer. You're tall enough to block the sun.
Steel yourself. You ready?
Habitica was a mistake. The underlying goal was always custom rewards. But it shark-jumped on digital rewards. "Take the guilt out of guilty pleasure" became "chase the rainbow". Where you once had an issue of motivation or structure, you now have anxiety.
It should always be custom rewards. Hanging with your friends, reading a chapter. Hell, playing a video game. Hell, eating ice cream and watching Love Island! Something real. All that hard-earned gold...
My Gnothi story's titled "Namer". It's about a mage in the high tower, understanding everything and doing nothing, missing life by quantifying and preparing. Adventuring down to the valley - from the dragons to the farms - a surprising inversion of fantasy. The message being: out of your head and into your life. Quantify so far as it improves behavior; beyond which, live. In exchange for gold if it helps you know you deserve it. And pray one day you'll know you do, just because. That quote threw me: "Sit, Namer. You're tall enough to block the sun." Gnothi has some zingers.
So. No swords. No shields. Except as a metaphoric vehicle for creative expression - an expression over which you have full autonomy.
Sure, the great modern debate. I'll just tell you that I take privacy seriously. LLM calls are AWS Bedrock: no human in the loop, no retention, purged upon receipt. And I'll continue to take privacy/security very seriously. My entries are there too - I have as much to lose as you. And I don't write light.
Which... is why this isn't open source, incidentally. I wanted OS with all my heart, but exposure is half the battle. If you can just trust me - I mean well by us.
Try Gnothi at gnothiai.com → Free to start. One-time payment unlocks everything permanently.