Day By Day

A cozy, kitten filled island game that encourages users to keep pushing past failure.

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Inspiration

Our team has had unpleasant experiences with productivity and habit apps in the past, where losing a streak you accumulated over months, just because of one bad day, makes you never want to try again. We wanted to build for the other days, the bad ones, the missed ones, and especially the day after you fall off. Day by Day was built from the ground up to encourage users even after they fail, because they always can and should try again.

What it does

In Day by Day, you furnish your island and cat avatar with props you buy as a reward for staying on task in the real world.

Each day starts with "How are you feeling today?" (Good, Okay, Bad or Terrible), and the game adapts to your answer. A bad day, and our app helps you ease the stress of your daily tasks. A terrible day is simply a rest day, with nothing to plan. Checking off tasks fills a progress ring and earns you coins and stars. There's no streak to lose, and stars are never taken back. In game progression is unlocked by staying consistent and building up stars over time. Your star count is a representation of all the days you showed up and put in the work.

Every return after time away is celebrated, and after a longer break you can win back the stars from the days you missed by finishing today. As long as you keep coming back and trying again, you deserve to be rewarded for your efforts.

A second chance is given in the evening. If the day got away from you, your list shrinks to what matters most, and finishing that still counts in full.

Letters to future you. On a good day, you write a few kind words. On a hard day, your cat hands one back. Friends who lift you up. You can encourage a friend with coins or stars they only receive once they reach a goal you set, so the gift rewards action. Encouragement you receive glows as a lantern on your island.

You can have your island open to friends, and visit your friends islands as well. Decorate your island and show it off, because you earned every prop that sits on it.

Gentle AI helpers (Google Gemini) assist with task that are hard, or sound hard, get broken into smaller steps that add up to the whole task, sized to your mood, and you pick which steps to keep. Harshly worded tasks ("stop being lazy and study") get a kinder name suggested.

How we built it

The game was build with Phaser 4 and TypeScript, bundled with Vite. The game scene itself is handled with a phaser scene, and the UI is HTML and CSS layered on top. The structure was build was claude, and the mechanics, design, and fine tuning was handled by us. We made sure the game was as accessible as possible, so we made sure it works on mobile, and has basic online capabilities as well. We hand drew all the art in the game, and created a pixel-perfect camera to show off the art in crisper detail.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled finding a good middle ground for the scope of our game. Some of us on the team wanted to lean more into the gamified aspects, while the rest were more focuses on the UI and real-life helpful features. Making the AI suggestions feel natural and not annoying was difficult. We had to make sure it only suggested splitting up tasks when they were big enough to be split up, and it only splits up tasks when you are having a less than okay day. Being too intrusive when you are having a good day feels belittling and can be annoying. Learning how to use claude, phaser, and typescript was all a challenge, as we have never used these tools before. It took a long time to set up our project, so we had to make sure the rest of the time we had left was spent even more wisely.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Were proud of our AI-free art and sound assets. While claude structured the majority of the game, all of us on the team agreed to keep the creative parts made completely by us. This let our soul shine through the game, and we believe it creates a much more welcoming and natural feel then if everything was made by claude. Learning to use multiple new tools at once felt extremely rewarding, especially for how well we think things turned out. Were glad we also found an actual valid reason to implement AI into our game, without making it feel like it was shoehorned in; it actually serves a reasonable purpose and is more than just a chat bot.

What we learned

We learned how and when to use AI tools to build an app, and learned how to focus on the parts that make an app actually good, which is human thought design and feel. We also learned to resolve conflicting visions for the app by finding the perfect balance between all our visions that we think will make our general user base more happy overall.

What's next for Day by Day

Real servers with real accounts, so friends can play from anywhere, not just on our prototype server. A full on mobile app, not just a web app. This will allow us to add notifications and smart watch integration. More customization will be on its way, allowing you to customize your boat, island structure, cat, and create a customized profile landing page. We will add more in game ways to reward yourself besides just decorating, and more ways to interact with friends. We will add more accessibility with a screen reader and multi-language support, because we believe our app can help and reach so many more people than it currently can.

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