Pausing until more players join

Hello there.  Just a quick note to update those following the game but not yet reaching out to play.  I'm waiting on players, so instead of doing this on my own and filling the blog with daily posts about my personal progress, I'm going to wait until I have at least one more player.  At that point I'll restart the game.

Have a great week!

Welcome to Friday!

It's our first morning here at Bloomify, or at least the first of the formal group game.  We have a couple players already who are getting set up, and are working behind the scenes to give you as smooth an experience as possible.  I'll be posting stats in the morning, and here's our first accountability post:

Player 1 (that's me!): Golden Flower (A full day of balanced tasks in each of the six spheres) +2 XP

I had forgotten to mention the experience/leveling system in my intro post.  Basically, each flower gets you a point of experience, and special flowers, like golden ones or those you earn from challenges are worth 2 XP.

Also, there's been a little addition to the game.  We'll be sending out custom flowers based on your data, and it will look something like this:

Have a great day friends!

Let's Play a Game

This is something that has been brewing for years now, and I finally have the gumption to put it out there.  I have this vision of a game I want to play that helps the player track the ways that they improve their lives.  I call this game Bloomify.  The premise is simple:  the player's life is divided into six spheres.  Each sphere represents the sorts of ways in which you can spend time improving yourself.  How you interpret these spheres is up to you, but after a lot of thought on the subject, I came up with the following:

1. Domestic
2. Secular
3. Spiritual
4. Physical
5. Creative
6. Social

Now not every activity you perform during the day would fit into these six spheres, but not every activity in your day aids in your self-improvement.  Sometimes you spend an entire day sitting on the couch binge watching your favorite TV show.  That might entertain you, but there is little personal growth in such an activity. 

So generally, if your life is a garden, sometimes you plant flowers and sometimes you don't.  Sometimes you set a larger goal for yourself, and then spend portions of your day doing things that would work towards that goal.  Goals are represented as trees in this game, but we'll talk more about that later. Let's just focus on the base garden for now.

Each day you play, you get a flower.  Each flower has six petals, one for each Sphere.  Each Sphere has a color.  As you fill in each of the Spheres with activities you've performed that day, that petal fills up.  At the end of the day, the petal with the highest percentage of activities wins and your flower turns that color.  For days where you are split between two or more spheres, you get a multicolored flower for your garden.  

Every great once in a while you will get a day that is chock full of self-improvement.  When all your spheres are full and balanced, that day you get a golden flower. 

At the end of your first week, you'll get another flower that represents your most popular Sphere, and a second to share with a friend.  At the end of the month, you'll get a special monthly flower for your garden, and at the end of the season the same.  I imagine there will be yearly flowers as well, but that's a little too far out for me to gauge.

In it's current incarnation, these flowers will most likely be in digital card form (like a baseball card) that I'll send out at the end of the day/week/month/season for players.  As we get going and the game evolves, the mechanics might change a bit.  For now though we're going to work on a small scale and see how the players enjoy the game.

Bloomify FAQ

How do you win the game?  By bettering yourself.  But since healthy competition really does work wonders for motivation, we'll have a few running challenges along the way.  Things like "most flowers in the week/month/season" or "most golden flowers" or even "most flowers of a certain color."  This is where I will probably get input from the players.  I don't want to turn this isn't something that people will game to win, since it's a game about improving yourself, not filling an imaginary the garden the best.  

How do you start the game?  First, leave a comment below letting me know you're interested in playing.  I will then add you to my spreadsheet (I've been running this myself on my own). Then send me an email with the address you want your cards sent to.  I will send you a link to a Google spreadsheet where you will have a page to keep track of your progress. At the beginning of the day I will put up a post with some sort of motivational message.  At the end of the day input all your scores into the spreadsheet. I will then tally up all the data, and send you your card.  I will then post the next day letting people know the current stats of the players. Easy peasy, Sweet Peasy that is.

What counts as a task? Each sphere is filled with tasks.  A task can be anything, with a few exceptions.  The first rule is that a task must improve your life.  You decide for yourself what this means. Secondly, We are adding to the garden of your life, not taking away from it.  So for an example.  You might have a physical task to stick to your eating plan.  The task would not be the places you limited yourself, but rather, the accomplishment of sticking to your plan.  In this case you wouldn't add every meal you ate but instead "stuck to diet" as a single task.  I give myself a point in Physical every time I go to the gym, for instance, but not for every exercise I do while I am at the gym.

I'm sure we'll come up with more questions as time goes on.  At this point, I've already been doing this on my own.  It's time now to see if other people would be interested in Bloomifying their lives.  Who's in for this adventure with me?