Solo dev here. We hand-made 137 animation groups per species, six species, 5,242 frames, for a habit app where the progress bar is a pixel pet.
Then our founder said: we made all those special animations and I never see a single one.
I assumed he was wrong. He wasn't. signature_move_played had fired once in the app's entire history. The cause was arithmetic, not art: a pool weight of 8 out of 108 with a selector ticking every 7 seconds meant a ~90 second expected wait. Our median session is 59.5 seconds. We had built twelve animations that a typical session could not reach.
Fixing it surfaced four more defects. But the one that still bothers me is meta: our own detectors produced ten false alarms during the work.
Every habit app I tried made me feel worse the moment I broke a streak: a red X, a counter back to zero. So I built the opposite.
Pixbu: you start with an egg. Do small things for yourself (drink water, take a walk, breathe for a minute) and it hatches, grows through stages, and evolves into one of six creatures with its own signature animations. Miss a day and nothing dies, nothing resets. It just waits for you.
I'm a solo dev. Pixbu goes live on Product Hunt this Sunday, so I would rather ask something useful than pitch.
Every habit tracker I used punished me for missing a day: a red X, a streak back to zero. So in Pixbu the progress bar is a pixel pet. It hatches from an egg, grows and evolves as you do small things for yourself, and when you miss a day nothing dies and nothing resets.
