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Comment by agawish

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Comment by agawish

Hi HackerNews, This is my first Show HN post for a quick side project that I've been using for the past 45 days straight!

It is yet another Habit tracker, but I've put a small spin on it!

I've bounced off every habit tracker I've tried, including gamified ones. The problem was never the tracking, it was that each one is an app I have to remember to open, and remembering to open an app is itself a habit I don't have. Not to mention the cheer overwhelmness - is that a word! - of it all, with the app trying to make you create multiple habits and even if you smash your goal out of the park, you get a simple check / star / emoji / you name it.

So I thought what if I just focus on a single habit, this habit owns its own biome, everyday I just get a reminder in inbox - I like operating from email - to remind me in the morning, and I can leave it there until the evening where I post my habit (in this case steps taken) and put a small journal while I was at it!

Not only that, but if the habit is quantifiable like steps to walk, when I smash it, I get better rewards! What rewards do you ask, just a small gamification element of collecting that's biome's creature sightings (also to showcase / show-off it to my kids!), I've built 6 different tiers of rarity, 10 creatures in each tier, that's 60 days worth if I want to collect them all.

The url is a small playable demo for a forest with a month of history in it, so you can walk the trail and open the field guide without signing up. Sound is off by default and the creature calls are worth turning on, if you don't want to try it you can watch a small 30 seconds-ish walkthrough with sound here: https://youtu.be/h2Y-A9gXgCQ .

This is all for myself and I was debating opening it at all, but a few friends told me this is worth sharing, so I'm collecting interest on https://lifebiomes.app (let me know how the design looks as well!) if you think this is worth spending more money on infra!

I know not all people like gamification element, but I'm betting that hate friction even more, and with this system you don't have to ever go to dashboard, you can completely operate from email and everything arrives at your door. When you want to relive that journey again, that mean including reading your journal entries again, then you get some good visual and sound effects to accompany it, to sell on the atmosphere. This got me through a tough time of my life, and I'm very happy that I've been documenting my journal as it was a great outlet for a lot of emotions over the past month and a half.

I've designed it to focus on one habit at a time to keep sharp focus, the idea is that after I master that habit, then a whole new biome with its different flora, colours, creatures and other elements open up, getting me more excited about the next habit I want to form, and not making it repetitive!

As for the technical side:

The backend is a small convex server for scheduling and postmark for emails with webhook to connect each email's reply to its correct entry time.

As for the dashboard frontend, it is using PixiJS + convex/react and bun / vite for builds.

The graphics are either CC or ChatGPT Image 2 generated. ElevenLabs provided the voices of the creature, but I might switch them off to something else!

Happy to answer anything.

Replies agawish · 2026-08-25
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