A teenager's life-RPG, designed from a screenshot and shipped to his phone in one morning.

The brief

My 14-year-old nephew Connor wanted his own version of a life-tracking app his cousin already had. He’s sharp, into skating, running, business, and fighting the same battle every teen fights — the infinite scroll. The goal: something that feels like a game he’d actually want to open, not a chore tracker his parents made him use.

What I built

A Telegram Mini App with a four-pillar quest engine — Body, Mind, Spirit, Craft — each tuned to Connor’s real answers from an intake questionnaire. Run/skate/pull-up goals. Focus blocks and an anti-scroll mechanic. A “business brain” skill track. A school grind. Each pillar has its own AI coach with a distinct personality, and a real-money “Payday” tab wired to his mum’s actual chore list — do the job, tap it, the dollars stack up.

• AI coaches that push toward real wins, not dependence — the Mind coach runs on a safety-hardened model with a crisis tripwire; the rest on a fast, cheap model.
• A custom neon theme built to match a visual mockup 1:1 — two-tone glowing title, a 2×2 pillar grid with live conic-gradient progress rings, and a gold Payday banner.
• Fully serverless — one HTML app, one Cloudflare Worker, KV for state. No VPS, no database server, effectively zero running cost.

The fun part

Connor’s uncle generated a look he loved in an AI image tool — a neon arcade-RPG HUD — and I rebuilt it as a real, themeable interface in the live app the same morning. From “this is the vibe” to “it’s on his phone” in hours.

Why it matters

It shows range: rapid product thinking for a specific human, AI integration with genuine safety guardrails for a minor, a pixel-faithful design translation, and a serverless architecture that costs nothing to run. Small user, real engineering.