Your daily calendar, reimagined as a charming pixel art RPG.
DayQuest transforms the boring act of checking your calendar into a tiny adventure. Each morning (or night before), walk your pixel-art hero through the events of your day — meetings become council gatherings, phone calls become carrier pigeons, and coffee breaks become visits to the alchemist's shop.
What if reviewing your calendar was actually fun? What if, instead of a list of abstract time blocks, you could play through your day as a mini-game?
DayQuest gives you:
- A cheerful, positive mindset before your day begins
- A mnemonic device that helps you remember what's happening and in what order
- Fun associations with even the boring parts of your day
Inspired by Stardew Valley's charm, The Sims' life simulation, Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. Simulacrum as goal.
- See your day — Events appear as a quest list with RPG-style icons
- Customize your hero — Pick hat and shirt colors from the Sweetie 16 palette
- Walk through it — Guide your character along a village path to each event
- Interact — Choose fun responses at each stop ("Feast heartily!" / "Sample the specials!")
- Collect stats — Earn Teamwork, Wisdom, Energy, Charisma, and more
- Level up — XP, levels, and streaks persist across sessions
- Complete the quest — See your Hero Profile with total stats
- 16x24 pixel art sprites with chibi proportions, colored outlines, and warm Sweetie 16 palette
- 10 event types: meeting, call, lunch, focus, exercise, coffee, errand, presentation, doctor, happy hour
- Randomized dialogue — 3 RPG-flavored variants per event type
- Typewriter text reveal on dialogue
- Branching choices with stat rewards and sparkle particle effects
- Persistent progression — XP, levels, streaks saved via UserDefaults
- Character customization — hat and shirt color picker
- Living world — floating clouds, fluttering butterflies, swaying flowers, dust trails
- Intro camera pan previewing your full day before gameplay
- Walk-home celebration with hearts and sparkles after completing all events
- Progress HUD with emoji dots tracking event completion
- Hero Profile on completion screen with level progress bar
- Launch the app and watch the intro camera pan — the camera should sweep across the village path, previewing every stop on your day before gameplay begins.
- Tap your hero on the overview screen and change the hat color — the sprite should update immediately to the new Sweetie 16 palette color, and your choice persists on relaunch.
- Walk up to the first event and pick a branching choice like "Feast heartily!" — dialogue reveals with a typewriter effect, you earn a stat (e.g. Charisma +1), and sparkle particles burst around your hero.
- Complete every event in the day's quest list — triggers the walk-home celebration with floating hearts, sparkles, and a final Hero Profile screen showing your total stats and level progress bar.
- Force-quit and relaunch the app, then complete another quest tomorrow — your XP, level, and streak carry over; the streak counter should tick up by one.
- Swift / SwiftUI — App shell, overview & completion screens
- SpriteKit — Game engine, pixel art rendering, animations
- No external dependencies — All sprites procedurally generated from pixel arrays
- Sweetie 16 palette — Warm, charming 16-color palette
- iOS 17+ — iPhone and iPad
- Real calendar integration (EventKit / Google Calendar)
- Sound effects and music
- More elaborate mini-interactions per event type
- Presentation rehearsal mode — upload slides/scripts and walk through them as game scenarios
- Memory palace mechanics — silly visual mnemonics tied to each event
Open DayQuest.xcodeproj in Xcode 15+ and run on an iOS 17+ device or simulator.
MIT
If you like seeing this kind of thing get built and shared, donations are always welcome — they buy hardware, render time, and the freedom to keep giving most of this away.
Built by Alex Coulombe Presents (ibrews).