Levely: Focused Practice

Levely turns focused practice into a roleplaying game. Pick a skill, start a session and earn XP as you level up the skills you actually care about.

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Inspiration

A few years ago I decided to change careers and become a software developer. There was one tiny problem: I couldn't focus. For someone planning to spend eight hours a day staring at unintelligible characters, that's a bit of a flaw. I tried distraction-free environments, dopamine detoxes, and whatever advice I got from strangers, sorry, experts, on the Internet.
In the end my salvation was a sheet of paper and a timer.
I love RPGs, so I made myself the main character in one. I wrote down every skill I needed to become a developer (Object Oriented Programming, Databases, JavaScript, etc.) and marked each one as level 1. Then I logged every study session. I awarded myself a level in that skill for every 5 completed session. It didn't matter how long the sessions were, only that I kept showing up.
I was LARPing as a studious mage. I borrowed the system from Morrowind, where skills go up as you use them.
It sounds a bit silly, but on the days it felt like I was going nowhere, I looked at my character sheet, and could see that my time was being spent wisely, and it worked! I've been working as a software developer for two years now.
Meanwhile, every focus app I tried rewarded me with a plant, or some sort of fluffy animal. Study for 25 minutes and a pixel tree grows a leaf. I didn't want to grow a plant. I wanted to grow me.
So when I found Shipaton, with zero iOS experience and an audience of roughly nobody, I decided it was time to turn that sheet of paper into the app I wish I'd had.

What it does

Levely is a focus timer that turns your practice into XP. Pick a skill (Japanese, guitar, programming or casting fireballs), pick how long, and focus. A potion vial fills as the session elapses. When the session is finished you gain XP and watch the skill bar climb.
The whole idea rests on the same rule my paper system ran on. An app can't know whether you're actually getting better, not without a camera pointed at your face, and I'm not doing that. So Levely doesn't pretend to. XP measures commitment, not competence. You earn 20 XP for every minute focused, plus a 10% bonus for finishing. You still keep what you’ve earned until that point if you abandon the session early, but if you stick to the end you get an XP bonus.

  • Every skill levels up on its own and has five ranks: Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert, Master.
  • A character sheet with your total level, lifetime hours practiced and nine titles to earn.
  • A History tab that shows every day (even the ones when you didn’t show up).
  • The countdown lives on your Lock Screen and Dynamic Island.
  • Rest timer between sessions.
  • A Home Screen widget representing a tiny character sheet.
  • iCloud sync across your devices, with no accounts. Your sessions live in your own iCloud.
  • Time Sensitive alerts that break through Focus modes, which is exactly where a focus timer's users tend to be.
    What it doesn't have: streaks. Miss a day and every bit of XP is still there.
    The free version is the whole app with up to three skills. A one-time $9.99 unlock adds unlimited skills, the widget and extra themes. There's no subscription.

How we built it.

I started with the pen and paper version and then realized that it’s the perfect concept for an app. ‘We’ is pretty generous. It’s me and the hours I’ve managed to spare at night after my full time job and after putting my son to sleep.
I’m a full-stack web developer and I have pretty much zero iOS experience. It’s been something I wanted to learn for quite some time but kept putting off. Two months wasn’t really enough to learn mobile development and also ship a polished product so I enlisted the help of AI in order to build it. I’ve leveraged my previous experience working in software and my own judgement in order to create Levely. Even though the app has been built using AI-driven development, every single decision on the structure, design and mechanics of the app was taken by me.
The design started with archaic methods, a piece of paper and a pencil.
I also documented the whole adventure as I went along. I’ve written 7 articles available at https://levely.quest/journal.

Challenges we ran into

Oh boy, where do I start?

Real life has no skill bar. Designing a skill progression system for real-life is more than just slapping an XP bar in an app. Progress can plateau for weeks and then suddenly jump. There is no skill cap. Playing the same guitar chord will help you become really good at playing that chord, but not a great guitarist overall. And so on. I’ve struggled to find a way I could bring a skill progression system to reality. In the end I came to the conclusion that I can’t determine a user’s competence through an app. That’s just impossible without a complete invasion of privacy and an ultra intelligent AI that can assess competence in any skill.
What I can measure however is commitment. Levely can show you that you’ve put in the hours of deliberate practice necessary to level up. What you actually do during practice is your responsibility. The best way I could leverage this discovery was to combine game leveling systems with focused practice sessions.

The leveling curve In terms of app mechanics, it took me a lot of time to come up with a leveling curve that is both engaging, yet still provides a serious challenge for users who pursue true mastery.
My initial plan was to calculate everything based off of the myth of 10,000 hours, which would have equaled level 100. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that true expertise is achieved after 10,000 hours of practice. There are some inherent problems with the theory which I won’t go into. It’s an arbitrary number, but it’s catchy.
My problem was that I’m developing an app for regular people, not Mozarts and Leonardos. To put it into perspective, 50 minute a day for two years is only 600 hours. Thankfully I realized pretty early that it’s insane to demand that level of commitment from a regular iPhone user. I toned it down a lot. It takes roughly 1,000 hours to reach level 100 now. It’s still a lot, but that’s intentional. I still want to offer a challenge for people that seek it.
To accommodate both users that are trying to form a practice habit and also future Michelangelos, I’ve adapted the leveling curve so that early levels come fast, and later ones progressively slower. To be honest I’m still not sure I’ve arrived at a sweet spot. I’m waiting on more user feedback before I can make further adjustments.

Marketing to an audience of zero The only thing I had when I started this was a 6 year old Reddit account with no karma. That’s it, no X, no Instagram, no Facebook, nothing. Somehow, and I still find it incredible I’ve managed to get people to sign up to my email list before Levely was launched. I didn’t even have a TestFlight build. It wasn’t a lot, 15 people, but they proved that there is interest in my idea.

Launch day Exactly 1 hour after I launched the app I got sick. I basically had to spend the day in the bathroom. Launch posts, subscriber emails, even a contest, it all went out the window.

I accidentally gave the paid version away The free tier is limited at 3 skills. During onboarding however, users could select as many skills as they wanted. There was no check in place….

Time Probably my greatest challenge. When I started the journey I told myself that I won’t let it interfere with the time spent with my 1 year old boy. I basically became a vampire for the past two months. All the work was done through the night.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • I shipped my first iOS app in two months, while working full-time and raising a toddler.
  • People are actually using it. Fifteen of my email subscribers downloaded it the day I could finally email them. In total I have 22 unique downloads at the moment of writing.
  • It grew well past the MVP I planned. Live Activities, the Dynamic Island, the widget, iCloud sync and rest mode were all built during Shipaton.
  • I kept a public journal the whole way through, and I didn’t skip the embarrassing parts.

What we learned

  • A story beats a pitch. The post people loved was the pen-and-paper system that got me my job, not the app built on it.
  • A deadline beats the perfect time. Without Shipaton I'd have waited for the right moment to build Levely, which would of never came.
  • Nobody wears every hat well at once. Developer, designer, marketer, QA tester, copywriter, journal writer. I thought I could do everything on my own, and I did, but not at the level I wanted to.
  • Marketing starts long before you have anything to market, and it takes a lot longer than the code.

What's next for Levely: Focused Practice

  • Achievements. Badges and a grid to show them off. The unlock system is already in the app; the badges aren't yet.
  • Titles that do something. Earning one should unlock something real, like a theme, not just change the line under your name.
  • A friendlier level curve. Faster early levels, and somewhere to go past 100, because real life has no skill cap.
  • Co-op focus quests. Focus alongside a friend. If you both finish, you both get bonus XP.
  • Polish. The potion liquid still isn't liquidy enough, and I don't love the widgets yet.
  • Finding my people. An article series on learning real skills with what RPGs taught us, written for gamers who'd rather level up themselves.
  • Keep documenting everything!

Built With

  • activitykit
  • cloudkit
  • swift
  • swiftui
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