IkigaiAI: AI-Powered Purpose Discovery App

Most users who sign up for a new platform don't know what to build first. They stare at a blank canvas, poke around, and leave. IkigaiAI reframes that cold start as a guided journey: instead of asking "what do you want to make?", it asks "what are you meant to do?"

The concept uses the Japanese framework of Ikigai (the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for) as the backbone for a full interactive experience with real monetization.

IkigaiAI is a full-stack web application with three distinct surfaces:

The Quiz. 12 questions across the four Ikigai zones. An animated Venn diagram fills in as you complete each zone, landing on a personalized archetype with a kanji symbol, a custom line from Koro (the AI guide character), and three blueprint cards. A soft-gate captures email at peak commitment.

Koro's Dojo. A 5-room pixel-art platformer built entirely with vanilla CSS, SVG, and JavaScript (no Phaser, no canvas). Rooms include a meadow, study, cubicle, open road, and workshop. 13 scrolls are hidden across interactive objects, with ~20 decoy props to throw you off. A cross-room secret relay (backpack to file cabinet to terminal in 180 seconds) hints at hidden mechanics. The workshop is hard-gated behind 13/13 scroll completion or a cheat code.

Two Paid Products. The Scroll Kit ($15, an archetype-personalized PDF field manual of all 13 scrolls) and a Koro Connect Session ($350, 45 minutes with the developer). Both are fulfilled automatically the moment a Stripe checkout completes via a signed webhook with an idempotency table. No polling, no manual intervention.

Koro isn't a chatbot bolted onto a landing page. He's a fully-realized character with a backstory, voice, visual identity, animated state sprites, and a custom Zo Persona that replies to emails and SMS in character.

Buyers and subscribers receive emails written in Koro's voice. The weekly digest (Sunday 9am PT) is templated. The midweek personal note (Wednesday 9am PT) is generated by Groq's Llama 3.3 70B with a Cerebras Cloud fallback on errors. Replies route back to an AgentMail inbox where I read and respond manually.

Platformer engine from scratch. Gravity, jump physics, solid and one-way platforms, platform mounting, sprite-and-hitbox alignment. All vanilla CSS + JS. Mobile-first at 375px, reduced-motion safe, keyboard-only operable.

Audio layer. Original ambient bed on the landing page (auto-played via the muted-autoplay loophole, unmuted on first user gesture), gameplay loop, and celebration track. SFX library built on Web Audio API: footsteps, jumps, lantern bells, scroll reveals, transition stings, and a dojo master arpeggio. A depth-counted music-ducking bus keeps everything balanced.

Dojo Master ceremony. At 13/13 scrolls: cinematic overlay with confetti waves, sparkle stream, god-rays, vignette, letterbox bars, screen shake, and a title slam timed to a celebration track. Three discrete pills surface the same conversion options as the reveal page.

Design system. Three-font stack: Press Start 2P (display), Nunito (body), Noto Serif JP (kanji). Token-based color palette. Hand-authored pixel art across all 5 rooms, 4 named hamsters, 5 Koro state sprites, and multi-layer parallax decor. Custom favicon with kanji in IkigaiAI gold.

Conversion design. Two-beat flow: free email capture at the dojo door (soft-gate), paid offers behind a single "Dive deeper with Koro" button on both the reveal and ceremony surfaces.

Hono on Vercel Node.js Functions. TypeScript + JSX + vanilla CSS on the frontend. Neon Postgres in production (SQLite locally), unified through Kysely as a typed query builder. Stripe payment links with a signed checkout.session.completed webhook. AgentMail for outbound email. Groq (Llama 3.3 70B) with Cerebras fallback for LLM-generated insights. Vercel Cron Jobs for scheduled dispatches.

Built solo in 4 days for the Zo Computer x Contra hackathon.