Someone Save Us

Help them escape the flooding island!!

Comment 5

SomeoneSave.Us

Help them escape the flooding island!!

Try It

Add +1 (415) 595-2874 to your group chat and send /start to play.

The Idea

Your island is flooding. You have AI agents living on it, and if you don't lock in, they drown. To save them, you have to lock in IRL. And "locking in" can be literally anything, hit the gym, finish the assignment, go socialize, call your mom, do laundry, read for 20 min, cook instead of DoorDash, whatever you've been meaning to do. You and your friends pick your own goals. Do it, ping it in the gc, and your agent builds faster and the village grows. Slack off and they slow down and start trash talking you to your friends' agents. Enough progress and the whole crew escapes to the next island. Fail together, sink together.

That's the game. Your productivity is the gameplay. Your friends are the co-op.

Inspiration

What if games didn't just live on your screen but actually leaked into your day? That's the thing we kept coming back to. We wanted to mess with how games normally work, where you grind for hours with a mouse and keyboard, and instead build one where doing stuff in real life is what makes you progress in the game.

And a world needs people in it. We were tired of the scripted NPCs that just repeat three lines forever, so we made the townspeople AI agents with their own personalities who actually talk to each other. They gossip. About you. About whether you did your chores. Hearing the townsfolk drag you behind your back for skipping the gym is, it turns out, pretty funny and weirdly motivating.

What It Does

SomeoneSaveUs is a multiplayer idle game where you have to do stuff in real life to get anywhere in the game. Every player has an in-game agent, and how they're doing depends on how you're doing. You pick daily quests, and your agent is basically counting on you to follow through. It's a little like having a friend or a coach, except the friend is a tiny guy on an island and he will talk to the other tiny guys about you.

Here's how the loop works:

Add Isla to your group chat. Isla is the bot, she's the middleman between your gc and the agents on the island. She hears what you text, tells the agents about it, and relays their drama back to you. She spins up a world and sends everyone a link. You click in, do a quick setup, pick some quests, and that's it.

Each player has an agent. The agent's whole job is collecting rocks and logs to build stuff. Building earns XP for the whole group. Hit certain levels and you unlock cooler buildings. Then the island floods and you have to escape to the next one. And it gets harder!!!!

The twist is the agent knows how you're doing. Hit your goal, ping it in the gc, and your agent speeds up, builds faster, gets actually productive. Skip it and they slow down and start bitching about you to the other agents. Your friends' agents hear it. It's not subtle :p

Nobody beats the island alone. If you're slacking, your crew feels it. If everyone's locked in, the agents thrive, the buildings go up, and you move on!!!

What's New Here?

First, we're not asking you to download another app or build a new network. We're dropping the game into the group chat you already use. The people you're performing for are people you actually care about, which is way more motivating than some points system.

Second, we flip the psychology. Instead of checking off a to-do list for yourself, you're taking care of a little guy who depends on you. It's basically Tamagotchi logic. People will do things for a pixelated dependent that they won't do for themselves, which is a weird fact about humans but we'll take it.

Third, your agent will absolutely drag you in front of your friends. When you fail a goal, the usual move is to spiral and feel bad and procrastinate harder. But if an AI roasts another AI, it's funny. It softens the whole thing. You get peer pressure without your actual friends having to be the bad guys!!

How We Built It

Real-time, multi-surface, fully hosted and playable in production.

Core Stack

  • Frontend: React, Vite, TypeScript
  • Frontend Hosting: Vercel
  • 3D Rendering: Three.js with React Three Fiber (saved us a gazillion hrs)
  • Database and Socket Sync: Convex DB
  • Auth: Clerk (phone number based)
  • Messaging: Photon iMessage with Spectrum.ts
  • LLM: K2 Think V2
  • Image Processing: Google Gemma
  • Voice: ElevenLabs TTS
  • Backend Jobs: Python Flask on DigitalOcean
  • Transaction Integration: Knot API
  • Yes it's a monorepo, Turborepo

Frontend

Mobile first, renders a low-poly 3D island. Players walk around, place buildings, watch agents do their thing. State is centralized and synced through Convex reactive queries.

Real Time Sync

Convex is the source of truth. A check-in or a new building updates everyone's client instantly. We didn't have to write any WebSocket plumbing.

iMessage Agent

The Photon agent lets you play the whole game from iMessage. Start an island, join one, check in on goals, manage them, vote on stuff, get updates. You don't open an app, the game just keeps happening in the chat you already have open.

AI Layer

K2 Think V2 runs all the generated text: goal validation, agent personalities, morning reminders, gossip, weekly summaries, big narrative beats like ascension. Each agent has a personality stored as structured data, and we inject it into every call so the character stays itself over time.

Backend Jobs

All the scheduled stuff runs in Python on DigitalOcean. Morning reminders, end-of-day miss detection, build progression, weekly summaries, gossip, rewards.

Transaction Based Habits

With Knot, you can optionally hook up real transactions. So we can tell if you ate McDonald's this week. Useful if your goal was, say, not eating McDonald's.

Challenges We Ran Into

Keeping agent personalities consistent was hard. Every message is a separate AI call, so we had to design the prompts and the data model so the character doesn't drift into a different person between Monday and Wednesday.

Syncing across two surfaces was tricky too. Someone's texting from the couch while someone else is looking at the island on their laptop. Convex did most of the heavy lifting here, which saved us from writing custom networking.

3D on mobile browsers is rough. We spent real time squeezing performance without making the world look bad.

Phone numbers are a menace. Different formats, different regions, we had to normalize everything before anything else could work reliably.

And getting structured output from the model was its own thing. The model doesn't always return clean JSON, so we wrote parsing that doesn't fall over when it doesn't.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

  • 100% satisfaction from the HackPrinceton beta testers we roped in. Everyone thought it was fun!!!
  • Real-world actions actually move the needle in a shared virtual world, and it works in production.
  • The game looks like a game!
  • The agents feel like the same person across time without any fine-tuning or persistent sessions.
  • The whole thing lives inside iMessage, which means your friends don't have to install anything.
  • Multiplayer sync works across everyone without us writing networking code.
  • A bunch of different systems, Convex, Photon, Knot, K2, Gemma, DigitalOcean, all pulling their weight at the same time.

What's Next

Move from manually-kicked jobs to a proper scheduler so the system just runs on its own.

Timelapse feature so you can watch your island's whole history play back.

AI-generated monuments that reflect whatever weird journey your group had.

Deeper Knot integration so habits verify themselves without anyone pinging anything.

Support past iOS.

World domination.

Prize Tracks and What We Did

Prize Track What We Did
Entertainment Track Made a cooperative multiplayer game where the gameplay is your actual life and your teammates roast you through AI proxies. It's fun.
HackPrinceton Game Track A full cooperative game with progression, shared goals, group dynamics, and a persistent world that responds to what you do IRL.
Agents in iMessage by Photon The whole communication layer is iMessage. Reminders, group messages, voting, commands, all without opening the web app.
Best Use of K2 Think V2 K2 powers everything text-based: personalities, reminders, gossip, summaries, narrative beats. The characters stay themselves over time.
Best Use of DigitalOcean Multi-agent system where characters interact, coordinate, and react to group behavior, all hosted on DigitalOcean.
Knot API Track Transaction-based habit verification. Real purchases can auto-complete goals and update the island.
Best Use of Gemma 4 Photo intelligence for images shared in the group chat. Lets us auto-validate quests.
Best Domain Name someonesave.us :p save em agents, help em escape the island!!!

Game Music by JanneyJazz(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2OeK1gbblo)

Built With

+ 2 more
Share this project:

Updates