A habit RPG in the spirit of Habitica, with richer pixel art, a calmer interface and content that lasts for years. Free, no ads, no premium, no account.
Habits are easier to keep when something small and alive depends on them.
In Dayquest your habits, dailies and to-dos power a pixel hero. Finish things and the hero earns experience and gold, finds eggs and potions, hatches pets, furnishes a home and beats bosses. Miss your dailies and the hero gets hurt. Habitica made this idea famous. Dayquest keeps the idea and changes three things:
- The art. Still pixel art, but shaded like a pixel artist would: light from the top-left, hue-shifted ramps, coloured outlines, glowing magic, a living scene that follows the real time of day and the real season.
- The pace. Content is built to last for years instead of running out in two months: seasons, an endless forge, bosses that come back stronger, achievements that need real time, a home to furnish.
- The price. Everything is free. No account, no ads, no premium, no server: your hero lives on your phone and moves to another one with a file or a code.
| Feature | How it works | |
|---|---|---|
| 🗡️ | Habits, dailies, to-dos | + / − habits, dailies on chosen weekdays or every N days, to-dos with due dates. Checklists open right in the list. Task colour shifts from red (neglected) to blue (mastered), and neglected tasks pay more. |
| 🌅 | A living scene | Your hero, pet and current boss stand in a pixel landscape with a dithered sky: dawn, noon, sunset, stars and fireflies at night. Ten places to unlock, from a sunny meadow and a cherry grove to castle ruins, a smoking volcano and islands floating in the sky. Mountains catch the light, the sea mirrors the sun, birds cross the sky and sunbeams slant through the pines. |
| ⚔️ | Boss fights | Every task you finish hits the boss, sometimes with a critical hit; every daily you miss lets it hit back. Damage numbers, sparks and coins fly in the scene. |
| 🐾 | 88 pets | 8 species × 11 hatching potions. Pick an egg and a potion in one card and see who hatches. Feed them their favourite food until they are fully grown and wear a tiny crown. |
| 💞 | Pet friends | Name your pets; each hatches with a character. Ten hearts of friendship grow with days together, treats and bosses beaten side by side: tap your companion to pat it, three hearts teach a flip, ten make a best friend. Every morning it leaves you a note. Clothes, two evolved forms, and your closest friends live at home. |
| 🌦️ | Weather and the album | Rain, storms, fog, snow and a rainbow after the rain, with an umbrella for the hero and a leaf for the pet. Big moments keep a picture of the scene in the album; collections earn titles and statues; daily visits climb a seven-day ladder of gifts. |
| 🛡️ | Gear you can see | Every helmet, robe, sword and shield changes both your stats and your sprite. The shop shows your hero wearing an item before you buy it. |
| ☀️ | Kind mornings | Before a new day starts, Dayquest asks which of yesterday's dailies you actually did. Night owls can move the day boundary up to 06:00. Rest at the inn pauses damage for holidays and sick days. |
| 🃏 | Card of the day | Every morning a card flips over with a twist on the day's rules: a goblin steals 5 gold until you catch him, a merchant halves potion prices, a blood moon doubles boss damage. 30 cards, and no card repeats within 30 days. |
| 🎆 | Perfect day | Finish every daily due today and fireworks go off over the scene, then a chest wobbles until you tap it open: gold, XP and two or three eggs, potions or treats. |
| 🎚️ | Pick your difficulty | Relaxed halves damage and fainting never costs a level; Heroic hits 50% harder but pays 25% more. Chosen at the start, changeable any time. |
| 🔊 | 8-bit sounds | Chiptune blips for every tick, crit, drop, level-up, victory and chest, synthesised on the phone (no audio files). Silent when the phone is. |
| 🧭 | A gentle start | A five-page guide explains the game with its own art before you create your hero, each tab shows a one-time tip on your first visit, and Settings → How to play replays the guide. |
| ↩️ | Undo anything | Every tap shows what it gave (XP, gold, damage, drops) with an Undo button that reverts it exactly. |
| 🔔 | Reminders | Per-task reminder times and an evening "dailies still open" nudge. |
| 📊 | History and insights | A 12-week activity heatmap, streaks, totals and a yearly chronicle. Every task has its own statistics: completions by weekday, the last 30 days, and its strength over 90 days. The hero screen shows what went well this month and what needs care. |
| 🧙 | Classes and skills | At level 5 choose a Warrior, Mage, Rogue or Healer: the class's stat grows twice as fast, and three skills cost mana (a fireball for the boss, a ward against tonight's damage, a shadow step that keeps streaks). Mana comes back with every task and overnight. |
| 📓 | Journal | Once a day, pick a mood and write a line if you like. After a few weeks the journal shows how your mood and your finished tasks go together. |
| ⏳ | Focus | A 15, 25 or 50 minute session with the hero on screen. A finished one pays like a task; leaving early pays nothing. Rings even with the app closed. |
| 🍺 | Tavern | Swap one-line hero codes with friends, no account or server. Friends' heroes show up in your tavern, and each fresh card (under a week old) gives +2% XP and gold. Share my hero posts a picture of your scene and stats. |
Most habit games run out of things to unlock within a couple of months. Dayquest keeps going.
| 🍂 | Real seasons | Blossom in spring, falling leaves in autumn, snow in winter, in every scene. Each season brings its own hatching potion (32 seasonal pets), a hat, a weapon and a cloak sold only then, and three seasonal bosses (from a queen bee to a snowman) you can each fight once per season. A switch flips seasons for the southern hemisphere. |
| 🔨 | The endless forge | From level 20, every 5 levels a new tier of gear appears, from rare to epic to legendary. Items are generated from their tier, so the forge never runs dry, and the prices keep gold meaningful. |
| 💀 | Bosses that come back | Beaten bosses return as Elite, Ancient and Mythic versions: recoloured, tougher, with richer loot. Twelve main bosses lead from the Slime King to the Hydra of Overcommitment, and a new generated boss of the week wanders in every Monday, drawn from 24 kinds of foe. |
| 🏅 | Achievements that need time | 53 achievements, from a 7-day streak to five years together, each with a gold reward. They measure real days, not grinding. |
| 🕳️ | The weekend dungeon | Every Saturday and Sunday a new dungeon opens, five rooms deep. Every finished task is a step deeper; each room pays, and the last one hides a chest and a saddle. |
| 🐎 | Mounts | Saddle a fully grown pet and it carries you through the scene, giving its perk in full on top of your companion's. |
| 🏠 | A home | A room, an attic under the roof with a round window and a garden outside the cottage, with over 60 pieces to place, plus wallpapers, floors, fences and paths. The fireplace, lamp posts and candles glow at night, windows show the real sky, the garden follows the seasons, and the pet sleeps in its bed. |
| Tasks | Boss fight | Stable | Shop | Home | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Everything stays on the phone. To continue on another device, open Settings → Move your progress and:
- Send file or Save file: a JSON file for any messenger, cloud drive or USB stick;
- Copy code: one line of text (
DQ1:…) to paste into Dayquest on the other phone.
On the new phone choose I already have a hero on the welcome screen. Where Google backup is available, Android's own device backup carries the database over too.
All sprites are drawn from small grids and shapes by a tiny engine in pixel/, which shades them the way a pixel artist would:
- light from the top-left with contact shadows where one material overlaps another;
- hue-shifted 5-tone ramps: cool violet shadows, warm highlights;
- coloured outlines instead of black ones, and a glow halo for enchanted items;
- a dithered sky that follows the real clock, parallax hills, clouds, stars and particles;
- the scene renders at about 170×72 pixels and is scaled by a whole number, so every pixel stays a crisp square on any screen.
Since everything is generated, a new boss, pet colour or forge tier is a line in the catalog, not a new drawing. That is what makes the long game possible without a team behind it.
Get the APK from Releases, or the debug APK attached to any CI run. Android 8.0 (API 26) or newer.
Tip
On Xiaomi (MIUI / HyperOS), Huawei and some other phones the system kills background apps and drops their alarms. If reminders arrive late, allow Autostart for Dayquest and set battery usage to No restrictions. Settings → Reminders don't arrive? opens the right screen.
Every screen, boss, item and achievement is translated, with proper Russian plurals and adjectives that agree with forged item names. Switch in Settings → Language; on Android 13+ the app also appears in the system's per-app language settings.
- Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, Material 3 with a custom palette (light and dark), Inter for text and the Handjet pixel font for headings.
- Room for tasks, checklists, history, hero, items and pets · DataStore for settings.
- The rules (XP curve, task value, damage, drops, day rollover, forge, boss ranks, seasons, achievements) are pure Kotlin in
game/, covered by unit tests. - AlarmManager (
setAndAllowWhileIdle, no exact-alarm permission): one alarm at the next reminder, re-armed on boot and app start.
app/src/main/java/app/dayquest/
├── game/ rules, catalog, forge, seasons, achievements, home, the Game engine (pure Kotlin)
├── pixel/ shading engine, sprites, the living scene, the room
├── data/ Room database, DataStore settings, JSON backup and transfer code
├── notify/ reminders and the evening nudge
└── ui/ theme, components, tasks · shop · stable · quests · hero · home · settings · onboarding
Requirements: JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/dayquest.git
cd dayquest
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest # unit tests
./gradlew assembleDebug # app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk
./gradlew installDebug # app.dayquest.dev, installed next to the release
./gradlew installDebug -Pdemo # app.dayquest.demo with a mid-game hero, next to the real app
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Ppreview=/tmp/sheets # render sprite sheets, scenes and rooms to PNG- Android CI (
.github/workflows/android.yml): on every push and PR runs unit tests and lint (missing translations fail the build) and uploads a debug APK. - Release (
.github/workflows/release.yml): push a tag likev1.0.0(or run it manually) to build a signed release APK and publish it as a GitHub Release.
MIT · Inter and Handjet under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Inspired by Habitica. Dayquest is an independent project and shares no code or art with it.