SillyWilly | Devpost

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Inspiration

It started with two teammates being annoying. Jero and Nic kept bombarding Grey with questions and check-ins, until she said something that stuck: "You two should just be a Tamagotchi that annoys me into staying on track."

That was the brief.

We didn't want another encouraging, positive, "you've got this" productivity app. We wanted something you'd screenshot and send to your group chat. Something your friends download just to compare. Something where bragging about your progress means bragging about your Willy. Less self-help. More shared joke that makes you productive.

What it does

Willy is a focus companion that lives on your screen. He starts small. He grows every time you complete a focus session. He judges you when you don't.

The longer you focus, the bigger he gets. And the more you unlock. Rare Willy forms are hidden behind focus hours. You don't know what you're getting. You just know you want it.

The social loop is the product. You screenshot your Willy. Your friends see it. Now they need a bigger one.

How we built it

We don't have a developer. Vibecoding was the only move. Grey led the build using AI-assisted code generation. Nic wrote the PRD and ruthlessly cut scope so we could actually ship. Jero handled ideation and UGC where he had Willy in front of real people early to see if it landed.

Challenges we ran into

No developer. That was the whole challenge, and also kind of the point. Grey was vibecoding with AI-generated code as the engine — which works until it really doesn't. We'd get something running, tweak one thing, and watch three other things break in ways that made no logical sense. Debugging without a dev means a lot of "let's just ask the AI why the AI broke." Sprites and animations were their own boss level. Getting Willy to actually move — and feel alive rather than janky — took way longer than expected. Turns out animation is hard even when someone else technically wrote the code. Nic was doing triage the whole time. Every feature that sounded fun in ideation had to survive the question: can we actually ship this in 36 hours? Most didn't make it. RIP to several Willy evolution forms that exist only in a Figma file.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Willy is real and he moves and he judges you. That alone felt impossible at hour two. We shipped a working focus timer with a creature that visually grows, which is the entire core loop. No dev, no prior sprite experience, one weekend. That's the win. But the bigger one: people got it immediately. We put Willy in front of strangers and they laughed — not politely, genuinely. And then they wanted to know what the rare forms looked like. The humor landed harder than we expected, and that told us the social mechanic isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole product.

What we learned

We learned how to animate and do sprits and scope and vibe code

What's next for SillyWilly

Rare Willy forms. More of them. Weirder ones. The mystery is the mechanic — you focus more because you don't know what you're getting, and you need to find out. A proper social layer so you can actually flex your Willy on your friends without having to manually screenshot and DM. Leaderboards. Rivalry. Public humiliation for the people who haven't opened the app in four days. And eventually: Willy merch. You know it's coming.