Awaken

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  Awaken: Recode Your Reality (Banner)

About the Project

We were three strangers who met by chance in Japan — unaware that within days, we’d be building something together that none of us could have predicted.

As we got to know each other, we discovered we shared more than just our location. Georgio Zikantas (Canada) brought deep expertise in sales and marketing. Bekiwe Simelane (South Africa) was an experienced AI developer. Herman Fluitt (United States) was a seasoned AWS and mobile engineer.

We also shared a love of anime, video games, and self-mastery. One late-night conversation led us to a common theme in anime: characters who get a second chance by being reincarnated into a new world where they could become their best, most powerful selves.

We wondered: What if that was possible in real life?

That simple question led to the creation of Awaken — a self-development app that turns your life into a video game. We blended anime-style storytelling with AI-powered daily quests, XP systems, streak logic, character avatars, and social guilds — all designed to help people level up in real life.

How We Built It

We used Bolt.new for rapid development and AI integration.

Our backend was powered by Supabase, while we are currently planning on using AWS infrastructure as a back up to handle scalability.

AI modules generate personalized quests based on user goals, habits, personal achievements, journal entries, and personality.

What We Learned

We discovered the power of merging entertainment design with real-world behavioral science.

Building with Bolt accelerated our AI pipeline dramatically and allowed us to do what otherwise would of taken much longer and require a much bigger dev team.

UI decisions rooted in storytelling helped us maintain user engagement even during early testing.

Challenges We Faced

We found out about the hackathon just four days before the deadline, which forced us to move fast, think clearly, and prioritize what truly mattered.

Integrating AI-generated quests with real-time behavior tracking pushed our limits.

Keeping the experience cinematic and consistent while still functional required intense collaboration between design and dev. Especially considering all three of us were coding the project at the same time.

Compressing such a bold vision into an MVP demanded constant prioritization.

Despite the constraints, the pressure sharpened our clarity and deepened our collaboration. It brought the best out of all three of us.

The Result

What started as a chance encounter between three strangers became a powerful new world — built to help others rewrite their own.

The best part, this is just the beginning.

See Awaken's promotional video : link See Awaken's website: link The promotional video is different than our demo video. This is more cinematic while our demo video is a full demo of our application.

Built With

• bolt.new
• chatgpt
• deepseek
• supabase