Family Quests
Household chores as a family adventure game
Overview
A gamified family chore manager that reframes household tasks as quests. Parents create quests and define rewards, children complete them to earn points, and those points are redeemed against a shared family treasury.
The two halves of the app are built for very different people. A child gets an illustrated quest log with no text they have to read closely and no account to log into; a parent gets a quest board, an approval queue and a treasury to manage. Points only move when a parent has approved the work and the child has collected it, so the reward is something granted rather than something the app hands out automatically.
Key features
- Two experiences, one app
- Adventurers and quest masters sign into the same family and see entirely different interfaces, built for very different ages and needs.
- A quest log a four-year-old can use
- The day's quests as illustrated cards with a point value and one button, designed to be usable on a tablet without an adult reading it aloud.
- Approval, then collection
- Children submit finished quests for review rather than marking them done. A parent approves, and the points still wait until the child collects them.
- The family treasury
- Parents set rewards and their point cost; children see what they can afford now and how far off the rest is, and redeem against their balance.
- Children sign in without an account
- Parents use Google; each child gets an unguessable permalink instead, so a young child needs no email address and no password of their own.
- Changes land on the child's device
- An approval given on a parent's phone shows up on the child's screen without either of them reloading anything.
Screenshots
Quest board: Set up the week once. Each chore becomes a card worth a set number of points, assigned to one child or left open to whoever gets there first.
Reviews and standings: Decide what actually got done. Every submission waits here with the points it is worth, so a parent awards them deliberately instead of the app taking a child's word for it.
Treasury: Decide what points are actually worth. Rewards are priced by the parents who have to honour them, which is what stops the currency inflating.
Family: Add a child and hand them a link. That link is their whole sign-in, so a child too young for an email address still gets their own private view.
The adventurer's day: What a child sees when they pick up the tablet. Pictures rather than a list of chores, one thing to press per quest, and the points they have earned but not yet claimed sitting at the top.
Spending it: Turns a points total into a decision. The split between what is affordable now and what needs saving for is the part that makes the number mean something to a child.
Stack
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- tRPC
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL
- NextAuth
- Tailwind CSS