HabiCat | Devpost

Project story

We want to contribute to the greater good. After conducting our research, we found that it is important to prevent illness by maintaining good daily habits. It is also a part The National Strategic Framework for Chronic Conditions 2026–2035 is Australia’s 10-year policy. However, one issue we noticed is that it is difficult to stay motivated every day. We need something that can monitor medication progress, track increases in daily workouts, and remind users if they forget. Therefore, we developed Habicat in order to address these issues.

Inspiration

We’ve seen too many people download a habit app, stick with it for a few days, then miss one day and never open it again. Streaks and numbers matter, but they’re rarely enough to make you want to come back.

So we asked: what if the reason you kept going wasn’t a number, but a little cat waiting for you at home?

Complete a habit and you earn biscuits to feed it; level up and you unlock a tiny hat or a cape for your cat. Your progress isn’t just yours anymore—it’s shared with a cat you named. That idea became HabitCat: a habit tracker that turns building habits into “raising a cat”—when you take care of yourself, you’re taking care of your cat too.

What it does

When you open HabitCat, you’re welcomed as a “neighbor”: you enter your name, pick a goal, set a plan, and name your cat. From then on, it lives in the little room on the home screen, waiting for you.

The home screen is your cat’s space. You can feed it with biscuits, meat, or milk earned by completing habits, watch the level bar fill up, and open “Today’s habits” to check off tasks or “Pantry” to feed. Habits can be done multiple times a day (e.g. morning and evening) and can have reminder times. Finishing a habit gives rewards and XP; leveling up unlocks new outfits in the wardrobe—a top hat, a mustache, a cape—so your cat feels more and more like yours.

Beyond your own cat, you can visit the Village and meet other cats (Whiskers, Felix, Mittens…) and see what habits they keep and what tips they have; tap one to open their full profile. If you’ve dropped a habit, the Abandoned page lets you face it instead of pretending it didn’t happen. On mobile (iOS and Android), we send push reminders at times you choose—e.g. 8:00, 12:30, 19:00—so a gentle nudge brings you back to “time to check on my cat.”

All progress—your cat’s name, whether you’ve finished onboarding, habits and level—is saved on your device. No account required; next time you open the app, it’s still your world.

How we built it

We built the whole “cat + habits” experience with a modern front-end stack: React and TypeScript for UI and logic, Vite for build and dev, Tailwind for consistent, easy-to-tweak styling. All app state—user name, cat name, level, XP, habits, cosmetics, neighbors, biscuits and feed feedback—lives in one context so the experience stays consistent from onboarding to home, village, and settings. Routing is set up so you go through onboarding first, then move naturally between home, wardrobe, village, notifications, and so on.

So you can try it in the browser and also use it as an app on your phone, we use Capacitor to package the same web app for iOS and Android. Reminders run only on real devices and are skipped on the web, so one codebase covers both “try it in the browser” and “install and use daily on your phone.” Level and growth can be thought of as: you’re at level (L), and the XP needed for the next level is (\text{XP}_\text{next}(L)); we use a simple curve for now and can tune it later for a more satisfying sense of progress.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of work went into connecting “feeding the cat” and “habits” in a clear way: completing habits has to grant rewards and XP, feeding has to consume items and give feedback, and that has to line up with level and cosmetic unlocks—the whole loop had to feel clear without overwhelming the experience. We also had to make habit reminders actually fire on mobile while staying silent and error-free on the web, so we had to draw a sharp line in the code between “only on device” and “skip on web.” That helped us understand the boundary between product behavior and platform capability. We also hit some bugs from state and asset references getting out of sync; we fixed those by centralizing state and persisting only what was necessary.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that the loop “complete habit → earn biscuits → feed cat → level up → unlock outfit” actually works end to end—users can feel that “when I do a bit more, my cat gets a bit more.” The home screen keeps the cat, pantry, and today’s habits in one place so it doesn’t feel fragmented; the village cats each have their own habits and tips, and you can open a full profile for each, which gives the product a small “world” of its own.

On mobile, we shipped habit reminders at configurable times (e.g. several times per day), with permission and push only on device so the web experience stays clean. Local progress—cat name, onboarding completion, habits and level—is saved so the next time you open the app, it’s still your cat and your journey.

What we learned

The main lesson was when to design for people and when to design for the platform. For users, a reminder is “tell me when it’s time”; for us, the code has to clearly say “do this only on device,” so the web stays calm and the phone delivers on the promise. Keeping state and persistence in one place and writing only the necessary bits to localStorage also helped us avoid a lot of state bugs.

We also learned that feedback for feeding and habits has to be fast and visible—tapping “complete” should show the reward right away, and feeding should have animation or copy so “raising a cat” feels real instead of just a number changing.

What's next for HabitCat

We want HabitCat to be more than a small game—to stay with you longer and feel more reliable.

Plans include: syncing habits and progress to the cloud so you don’t lose them when you change devices or reinstall; streaks, achievements, and weekly challenges so “one more day” feels more rewarding; and making village neighbors real—add friends, see each other’s progress, maybe send a few biscuits so building habits feels like something you do with others. We’d also like the app to work offline (save locally, sync when online) and to improve accessibility and add more languages (e.g. Chinese) so more people can use HabitCat comfortably.

The story keeps going: you build habits, your cat levels up with you; you take care of yourself, and you take care of your cat.

HabitCat — Build habits, feed your cat, grow together.