Context

This is a gamified AI travel journal app that captures your in-the-moment travel thoughts and turns each journal entry into a unique AI-generated house based on what you wrote. You can seal your memories inside each house and choose whether to share them with friends, who can play a small riddle game to guess where you traveled before unlocking your story.

Team

Myself

Tools

Figma

Illustration

HTML/CSS/JS

AI

Claude

ElevenLabs

Anthropic API

Cursor

Timeline

April 2026

Concept

Each house is a container for a place. Not a literal building, but a mood: color, light, architecture, and the small objects that point toward a city or a landscape.

The core loop is simple. You speak or write a journey, a house rises from it, you seal it, and a friend has to charm five clues out of the house spirit before guessing where you were. The delight is in restraint, showing less so the reveal means more.

Visual process

I drew houses first to set the visual direction. Warm interior light against a night sky, patterned facades, and gold trim, so every house would read as one family before any of them carried a specific destination.

Then I used an AI generation API to build the rest. It produces houses in the style I established, but each one is unique to what the user actually wrote in their journal entry, so no two journeys ever raise the same house.

The pattern does the hiding. A damask, a paisley, a painted stripe: each one hints at a material culture without ever spelling out a city, which is what keeps the guessing fair.

Three illustrated houses showing the shared visual language: damask, paisley, and striped facades with warm lit windows and gold flowers.
Three hand-drawn houses that set the style the AI generates against.

The flow

The whole experience is a loop between two people. The traveller who speaks a trip into a house, and the friend who has to guess where that house came from. These are the screens in the order you actually meet them.

Onboarding: meeting the village

Four screens to explain a format nobody has seen before: what you do, what you get, and what your friends do with it.

The whole pitch in one line, a journal that becomes a game your friends play, with two ways in: build your own village, or open a friend's link.
01The whole pitch in one line, a journal that becomes a game your friends play, with two ways in: build your own village, or open a friend's link.
Card one sets the input model. Hold the glowing orb and speak; your words become the pages, so journalling never feels like homework.
02Card one sets the input model. Hold the glowing orb and speak; your words become the pages, so journalling never feels like homework.
Card two makes the reward concrete. Every journey raises a little glowing house, and the photos and dates live inside it.
03Card two makes the reward concrete. Every journey raises a little glowing house, and the photos and dates live inside it.
Card three reveals the twist, and the CLUE 3/5 badge quietly teaches the rule before anyone has to read it.
04Card three reveals the twist, and the CLUE 3/5 badge quietly teaches the rule before anyone has to read it.

The empty village

The hardest screen in the product: the moment before there is anything to look at.

One lantern, one instruction, and a night sky doing the work of making emptiness feel calm rather than broken.
05One lantern, one instruction, and a night sky doing the work of making emptiness feel calm rather than broken.
Zeroes shown honestly across journeys, guessed, and notes, with a single obvious way forward.
06Zeroes shown honestly across journeys, guessed, and notes, with a single obvious way forward.

Writing a journey

Capture stays deliberately plain so the ornament lives in the village, not in the writing.

A title, a body, and a mic. Photo and voice sit at the bottom edge, out of the way of the sentence you are trying to write.
07A title, a body, and a mic. Photo and voice sit at the bottom edge, out of the way of the sentence you are trying to write.
Before sealing, the journey is private and editable. The UNSEALED badge makes sure the state is never ambiguous.
08Before sealing, the journey is private and editable. The UNSEALED badge makes sure the state is never ambiguous.

Sealed and shared

Sealing is the hinge: the moment a private journal turns into a riddle someone else can play.

After the first journey the copy changes tone, your village glows with one house, and that house becomes a real object on the shelf.
09After the first journey the copy changes tone, your village glows with one house, and that house becomes a real object on the shelf.
A village with something in it. One journey, sealed and waiting to be guessed, which is the hook that pulls friends in.
10A village with something in it. One journey, sealed and waiting to be guessed, which is the hook that pulls friends in.

Journey map

Mapping the experience end to end exposed the one stage that design could not decorate its way out of: the empty village. Everything before it is promise, everything after it is payoff, and the dip in the middle is where a first-time user decides whether this is worth the effort.

Stage
Discover
Onboard
Empty village
Journal
Seal & share
Guess & unlock
Emotion
Feeling
Curious
Charmed
Hesitant
Unhurried
A little mischievous
Delighted
Doing
Opens the app or taps a friend's village link.
Swipes three cards: orb, house, five clues.
Lands in a dark valley with zero journeys.
Holds the mic and talks, then names the place and dates.
Seals the riddle, then copies the village link.
A friend gathers five clues, then guesses.

Scroll to see the full journey →

Future

I want to add sound effects next, so the village has an atmosphere and not just a look. A house that hums quietly when you open it, a chime when a friend guesses right.

After that, release it into the real world. A good app needs more users than just me, and the guessing loop only really proves itself once strangers are playing it with each other.