brutes

byRAKSHAN

Brutes A habit-and-focus tracker where a creature evolves as you grow — Design Document 1. Concept Overview Brutes is a personal productivity and habit-tracking app, inspired by the app Forest (where a tree grows during focus sessions). Instead of a tree, the user raises a creature that evolves over time based on real behavior — completed tasks, consistent daily routines, and progress fighting addictions or bad habits. Each creature lives within a biome that reflects its evolutionary path, and the app surfaces daily, monthly, and yearly summaries of the user's activity. 2. Why the Creature Exists The creature is not a decoration layered on top of a tracker — it is a visible proxy for otherwise invisible effort. Most self-improvement happens silently: discipline, focus, and recovery accumulate day to day without any way to feel that progress directly. The creature solves this by giving effort a body. This works because of two well-understood psychological effects: Loss aversion for something alive — people protect a living thing far more reliably than an abstract streak counter. Identity reflection — over months, the creature's final form mirrors who the user actually was, not who they intended to be, which is more honest and more motivating than a plain to-do list. Its purpose is threefold: to externalize progress that can't otherwise be felt day-to-day, to create genuine emotional stakes in consistency, and to tell the user's own habit history back to them through its evolution. 3. What Makes the Creature Grow Growth is driven by three distinct behavior types, each treated differently rather than pooled into a single XP number. 3.1 One-off tasks (completion-based) Discrete actions such as a workout, a reading session, or a finished sprint. These grant an immediate, small growth tick right after completion, similar to Forest's tree growing during a focus session. Fast feedback loop, good for short-term motivation. 3.2 Daily routines (consistency-based) Recurring habits such as sleeping on schedule, a morning walk, or journaling. These reward sustained streaks rather than any single instance — small ticks per day, with a larger jump at streak milestones (7, 30, 100 days). This is the primary driver of evolution stage changes, since evolution should represent sustained identity change, not one good day. 3.3 Fighting addiction or avoidance goals (restraint-based) This is tracked by time-since-last-relapse rather than completed actions, since it is about absence of a behavior. Design principles: No punishment mechanic on relapse — a creature that shrinks or dies on relapse mirrors real shame spirals and can cause users to avoid opening the app after a slip, which is the opposite of the intended effect. A dedicated Resilience stat grows with clean time and pauses (never reverses) on a relapse. A private, judgment-free log with no animation or popup on relapse — the app's role here is to add no guilt on top of an already hard moment. 4. Stat System Stat Fed by Represents Vitality Exercise, physical tasks, sleep hygiene Body / energy Focus Deep work sessions, study, reading Mind / concentration Discipline Daily routines, streak consistency Identity / consistency Resilience Time since last relapse on addiction/avoidance goals Restraint / recovery Discipline acts as a meta-stat: it rises slowly whenever any other stat is fed consistently, since consistency itself is the trait the app is ultimately trying to build. 5. Evolution Structure Each stat branch has four stages: Dormant, Stage 1, Stage 2 (intermediate), and Final. Thresholds are time/streak-based rather than raw point totals, so evolution cannot be grinded in a single binge session: Dormant (Day 0–3): identical for every user, no stat lean yet. Stage 1 (~1–3 weeks): first branch, determined by whichever single stat is currently highest. Stage 2 (~4–8 weeks): visibly larger and more developed than Stage 1, escalating the same branch's traits. Final (~2–3 months): branches further based on the ratio between the top two stats, not just the leading one. Design lesson from this project: consecutive stages must differ in structure (silhouette, added features, environment), not just color intensity, or users can't visually tell the creature has evolved. 6. Biomes Branch Biome / terrain Visual language Vitality Volcanic terrain Lava, cracked scorched ground, warm orange sky Focus Cold stone ruins/chambers Mist, blue-white ambient light, no fire Discipline Structured/architectural terrain Carved cliffs, fortress-like stonework Resilience Dawn light over healing terrain Cracked earth with new growth pushing through 7. Creature Branches Branch Archetype Dormant → Stage 1 → Stage 2 → Final Vitality Fire dragon-warrior Scorchling → Cub → Ashfang → Cinderwing Focus Cracked-mask predator Hushling → Fracture → Sever → Wraithmask Discipline Armored ram, gold segments Cairn → (TBD) → (TBD) → (TBD) Resilience Warm, dawn-lit recovery creature (TBD) Naming rule: every evolution stage, across every branch, has its own unique name — no name is reused. 8. Legendary Tier A rare tier above the normal branch lineage, reserved for exceptional milestones: breaking an addiction, an unusually long streak, or an extreme cumulative hour count in one category. Triggered by milestones (e.g. 100-day unbroken streak, 90+ days relapse-free, 500+ cumulative hours), not points — stays rare by design. A small separate roster (roughly 3–5 total), one per milestone type. Distinct visual language from branch creatures — more mythic/ancient, glowing sigils rather than scale cracks. The addiction-recovery legendary should read as serene and dawn-lit, not battle-scarred, consistent with the Resilience branch's non-punishing tone. 9. App Dashboard A timeline showing each evolution stage next to the date/streak that triggered it. An auto-generated monthly growth report: time by category, biggest streak, estimated time to next evolution. A yearly view functioning as a full journey map across biomes visited/unlocked. A simple radar/spider chart of the four stats for an at-a-glance "shape." 10. Open Items Discipline branch: Stage 1, Stage 2, and Final forms and names still to be designed. Resilience branch: full archetype, lineage, and names still to be designed. Full Legendary tier roster and individual designs still to be defined. Evolution transformation video prompts being generated stage-by-stage using first/last frame references (validated on Scorchling → Cub and Cub → Ashfang).