TLDR; This Sunday, Levla playtesting begins (1-2 weeks), another announcement coming on Sunday with download links!
IT'S TIME!
After 6 months of intense development, Levla is FINALLY entering the playtesting phase, and I am super proud of what me and @ModBack have built together (for a first version!).
Below you'll find a big yap from me about the app, the playtest, roadmap, and some big decisions we made leading into this.
On Sunday you will be able to download the app and start setting up your Habits, Todos and Character for the week ahead.
Want to claim a username? You can do so now by clicking here.
The goals of the Playtest
The playtest is basically to figure out the state of the app, so I have a few questions that need answering:
- How does the core app (not the game elements) feel to use? Could it be your daily driver for Habits & Todos? If not, what's missing?
- How does the game side of the app feel? Rewarding? Boring? Addicting? Fun?
- How balanced is the app? Does progression feel too fast, too slow, or just right? Remember this should be a long-term investment!
- How is performance? Snappy? Sluggish?
- Any bugs or annoying UX issues that need sorting out?
- Do you feel the need to cheat? Should it just be a game instead of a productivity tool?
- Which features are your favorites? What makes you come back (if you do)?
- What direction should the app take? Productivity? Self-Care? Game? We will figure this out together!
Once all of these questions get a thumbs up, the app in my eyes is ready for a real launch!
How does the app actually work? What do I do?
By taking care of yourself IRL and completing your todos and habits, your in-game character grows stronger. Simple as that.
The app is split into two parts: IRL and Game, and IRL fuels the Game.
By doing things connected to your real life, such as completing Todos & Habits, writing Reflections, going for a walk or staying focused, you get rewarded with resources that fuel your game character:
Stamina
Stamina is what your character uses to go on Adventures. When your character goes on an Adventure, you select how long it should take (1-8 hours), and when it's completed you receive rewards based on what type of adventure you did!
Think of this as the "Energy" of the game. Stamina has a cap of 100, which can be increased to 200 based on your Agility Skill.
Like all other rewards, Stamina scales based on the effort required to do the IRL action.
Experience
All actions add flat Experience into an "XP Lamp", which you can allocate to any skill you wish. Once you allocate XP to a skill, a bunch of multipliers get added, such as streak multipliers & level scaling (higher level = higher XP).
Coins
Coins are rewarded from Habits & Todos, and can be spent at Vendors to upgrade gear, get supplies and materials to help your character on their adventures.
For the playtest this will be very limited, but we are adding more stuff to spend coins on and gold sinks to keep the economy balanced.
Essence
During the playtest, all users will be part of our "Membership" plan (the paid version of the app). This grants you Essence on all habit & todo completions. Free users in the real version will receive Essence randomly at a 10-20% drop rate.
Essence can be spent on cosmetic items in the Essence Shop.
Important: We have decided that Essence will not be purchasable through In-App Purchases to keep some form of fairness to this system!
As you earn these rewards, your character grows stronger and unlocks more content and cooler stuff in the game world. The gameplay loop works something like this:
Do IRL Actions → Earn Rewards → Send Character on Adventures → Earn More Rewards → Repeat
The app is not demanding in any way. 30 minutes per day is enough to progress at max capacity.
What's in the app for Playtest?
Up until this point, we have been fully focused on bringing everything together rather than focusing on game content, and I also made some decisions to cut features for the playtest. That said, there is still a lot to dig into:
What's in the App:
- Full Habits & Todos tracking
- Reflection system (on Habits & Todos, free-form, and prompts by categories like Gratitude)
- Focus Mode (no-cost stamina adventures)
- Exploration (go for a walk and earn XP + Stamina)
- Character Customization
- RPG Progression
- Vast Adventure System (uses Stamina)
- AFK Training - Level up an individual skill passively [Idle]
- Resource Gathering - Gather resources and loot passively [IDLE]
- Farming - Plant seeds, grow crops and harvest to use in the Alchemy skill [Interactive]
- Exploration - Take walks to replenish Stamina [IRL]
- Dungeons - Fight through waves for loot to make your character stronger [Idle]
- Character equipment (visible on your character model in-game and makes you stronger!)
- Item & Potion Crafting
- Marketplace & Shops to buy items from Vendors & Merchants!
- Quest system
- Inventory System
- Leaderboard
Keep in mind: We haven't had time to fill out all the content yet. So for the playtest, Crafting, Quests and Dungeons will be limited. This is focus #1 for me after and during the playtest.
The focus after and during the Playtest
My vision is to build a vast world your character lives in and a very social app. So during and after the playtest, my focus will be split into three buckets:
- Bug Fixes & QOL Updates
- Content (Character, Adventures, Animations, Scenery, Progression, Skills)
- Major Social Update
The first two are obvious, but let me explain the third one:
I know a lot of you here are coming from Habitica and most likely witnessed how the social aspects of Habitica both died and got gutted by the team behind it. I'm personally very passionate about social features and community building, so I really want to step up here and build something truly amazing.
Over the past few months while developing the app, I tried a few social features like Guilds, Friends, DMs and Global Chat. The concepts were great but my execution didn't live up to my standards, and it was hard to focus on social when I still had to fix the foundation. So I scrapped all of it, because what's the point of social features if the core sucks?
Once things calm down, I am going to dedicate a lot of focus to a major social update. I don't know exactly what shape it will take yet, but this is a priority for me.
We're leaning into the Game and RPG aspects more
Very recently we hit a crossroads when designing the game mechanics of the app, so I want to explain some of the game design changes we made leading into the playtest.
The skills in the game should be connected to IRL Habits (e.g: Going to the gym = Train "Strength")
This was a core aspect of the app since the very beginning. Your character kind of represents what you're working on IRL, which sounds great on paper, but when designing the progression loop we hit some real problems.
It creates a lot of limits in how you can progress in the game world and how we can build content around it.
For example, we would need skills like "Commerce" & "Charisma" for Finance & Social habits, which would be extremely hard to both integrate and balance. If one user only works on Finance-related habits (spend less, eat at home more) and only levels "Commerce", they wouldn't progress nearly as fast as someone with Fitness-related habits. It also made it hard to add skills that make the game world better. How do we connect a Habit to "Ranged" where you get better at using Bows?
So we decided to decouple IRL actions from specific game skills. Now, you just allocate your rewards as you like. You can still skip combat-related content if you wish, it is completely up to you!
We also reworked a few skills to make more sense in the world we're creating.
This change also gave us more room to do something we were already thinking about.
Leaning into the game world more and its RPG aspects
When we talked with users from other apps in our niche, we often heard that a lot of the time the app was "too much of a game" and not enough of a productivity app.
So from day one, we decided to put most of our focus on creating an amazing Habit/Todo system that could be your daily driver, while keeping the game mechanics on the down low.
But recently we realized something: we believe the reason users don't like apps that are more "gamey" actually has nothing to do with there being too many game mechanics. It's that the execution of the whole concept is bad.
We analyzed these apps and saw the same things in every single one:
- It's confusing to use, and it's hard to tell if it's a game or a productivity app
- The UX & UI is terrible in almost all of them
- Lacking good fundamentals in both game design and productivity features
We believe that to build an app like ours successfully:
- You need an extremely good foundation that is viewed separately from the game
- While the game mechanics can be immersive and have depth, they have to lean towards the Idle game side of things
And this is what we do.
So we've made the call to give ourselves more freedom when it comes to adding features to the game world. These will still remain within our constraints of being not time-demanding, but we believe this is the right long-term call.
IMPORTANT: This is just what we believe as of today and we hope the playtest will bring answers on what direction we should take. We are completely ready to pivot into any direction the feedback takes us.
What about the roadmap for the future?
The roadmap for the future is huge, and more on that in a later post, but some things we have planned are:
- Construction (build your own house & furnish it!)
- Pet collecting (through adventures, skills and such!)
- Economy & Trading (very important to get balancing and gold sinks right for this one)
- Group Activities, Community Events, Raids
- NPCs with dialogues (system is ready, we just want to get it in without bloating the app)
- Slayer, Monsters, Weaknesses
- Clue Scrolls (rare cosmetic items)
- More content across the board (adventures, skills, crafting, dungeons)
- More updates and improvements to our core (Habits, Todos etc)
That's it! Thank you all so much for being here and showing interest in Levla. I look forward to hearing your feedback in the coming weeks.
