GOTHCHI

Inspiration

GOTHCHI was inspired by how our generation struggles increasingly with their mental health and has difficulty identifying their feelings. We wanted to satirize typical “fix-it” tools by creating a broken, darkly funny creature that makes people practice the art of caring for, and, in doing so, learn to recognize its emotions and understand themselves a little better without even noticing.

What it does

GOTHCHI is a virtual anti-hero creature you talk to, challenge, and decode. The user must ask questions, analyze its reactions (both verbal and physical), and finally name the hidden emotion behind its chaos. If you get it right, GOTHCHI switches roles and takes an interest in your “mess.” If you fail three times, it dies and you have to start again. Also, it has memory: it will remember past interactions and use them to blame you if needed.

How we built it

We sketched GOTHCHI in Procreate, modeled it in Blender, and prioritized facial expressiveness over full-body animations to keep the logic manageable.

Animations were created in After Effects, then integrated into the user interface with three.js, HTML, CSS, and Tailwind, structured in a Vue 3 framework for flexible component control.

We refined its borderline-offensive tone and built an empathy-scoring system with GROK and connected to the app through its API. All of this was connected to IndexedDB for local storage. We also integrated WebVoiceAPI to explore voice features specially useful on desktop.

We moodboarded and wireframed initially in Figma to keep UI/UX decisions consistent with the darkly playful aesthetic.

Challenges we ran into

Github implementation doesn't work well. We had to start over in the middle of the project (second week of June) because it lost most of the development we had up to that date.

Syncing animations to user inputs with correct empathy scoring took a lot of iteration. We also faced technical challenges making sure the facial textures worked properly and that the face loaded precisely in its designated area within the 3D model. In general, getting the logic and interface to interact seamlessly without breaking anything was a major hurdle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We love having found an ironic way for people to learn about emotions without the typical soft, sugarcoated tools that often feel heavy or condescending (GOTHCHI hates condescendence).

We’re proud of how GOTHCHI feels authentic, with humor, darkness, and vulnerability woven into short, punchy replies. We also love how the empathy-scoring logic triggers believable mood swings and lets users practice naming emotions in a non-traditional, edgy setting. We’re also proud of managing to integrate all the logic with the interface smoothly, making everything look and feel right without breaking.

What we learned

This was our first full project of this complexity using a tool like bolt, beyond having previously used similar as Cursor. We see potential in vibe coding, even though there are still big technical challenges at least from our experience. We started really enjoying the experience in bolt.new, but at the end there where too many problems with it: it suddenly stopped understanding what we wanted, removing stuff that we didn't ask to remove... it took too much iterations and the result is not 100% what we envisioned.

Any way, we’re excited to improve at the same time the tool gets better and push forward with new projects.

What's next for GOTHCHI

We want to expand GOTHCHI’s emotion reactions and refine UI and logic a little bit more since it's not 100% the way we envision. We'll also add GOTHCHI's a voice. We already created one in ElevenLabs and it's great but couldn't manage to introduce it, we ran out of time. We’re also exploring different skins for the GOTHCHI: Accesories that you can earn thanks to name the emotion correctly and, in the future, even new GOTHCHI's with slightly different tones without breaking the ecosystem.