Creature of Habit: Devlog Chronicles - Part 5
The Beta is here...and a new thumbnail. š
(Belated) 1 Year Anniversary
A bit behind on the anniversary note, but November 10th 2025 marked the one-year anniversary of the Initial commit for the project! Ohhhh boi, this has been a long journey, and hopefully, soon, a journey that will be coming to an end. I learned a ton from working on this project and will be doing a final post to conclude this series, but in this article, I want to focus on the beta for the app! Currently using Railway for deployment of the Web App and Tauri for the desktop app, but the desktop app isnāt built just yet. I thought it would be a simple launch alongside the web app, but I will get into why it wasnāt further along in this article. But here it is in all its glory:
Ā» Creatures of Habit Ā«
Get in there and create an account, stress the app out, and hopefully you can at least admire the work behind it, if not find some use for it. Iāve sent this to family and a few of my close friends to give some feedback before I let the world stress test it. Got some great feedback from all of them, and I also found PostHog to be an amazing tool when people actually started messing around in the app. Well worth the time investment there, and will be recommending them to anyone looking for a free analytics alternative. But after the few fixes and QOL improvements, I feel like itās ready for others to criticize my app and judge me š. Weāll keep this one short.
āHow do I get started?ā you asked??
Well, let me tell ya, itās easy as 1,2,3 (and 4).
Step 1 - Create an Account
Pretty straightforward step. Get your account and your creature created, then youāre off to the races
Step 2 - Create Your First Habit
You can create a new habit through the dashboard or on the /habits page.
Here is what the habit form will look like. Make your choices and set the habit to start on a future date as well.
Step 3 - Complete the Daily Quest
After youāre done adding habits, head over to the quests page and complete the Daily Quest. You gain a reward for completing the quest regardless of how many questions you get right, but of course, getting the correct answers has its benefits. If you get 3 answers right, you get a stat point boost and some additional experience. You get all 5 correct, and you get 2 stat points and even more exp. So definitely aim to get the right answers
.
(Maybe) Step 4 - Complete Any Habits That Were Due immediately.
Get to it!
The Delay For Desktop
That subtitle kinda sounds like an IT started a band on the side for funā¦.. A band I would prob go see lol. But anyway, the reason for the delay with the desktop app stems from two things: Code Signing and Distribution.
Distribution
I need to follow 2 different procedures for getting a proper distribution for both Windows and Mac (Sorry Linux folks āš¾). I want to get these into both the Microsoft and Apple stores for distribution, but for now, the easiest solution is to add installers for both of the operating systems and then just add a section for people to download it on the homepage or when youāre signed into the app. But in order to do this, I need Code Signing.
Code Signing š«©
Apple is lame as hell. To list it on the App Store, you NEED to pay the $99/year Apple Developer.
Now I get it, this is meant to keep nefarious actors from spamming the app store with trash or corrupted apps. What I DONāT get is why the hell does using the free account still prevent me from notorizing my app, so it when itās downloaded from the DMG, itās gonna show up as ānot verifiedā when opening the app. So Iāll prob still work on the free account before deciding to actually pay for this subscription. With Windows, I just need to create an account, and so far, I havenāt seen anything about a subscription, but if one pops up, they can kick rocks too.
Outside of the cost hurdle, the builds should be simple enough for both Windows and macOS.
Work So Far
Check out the projects repo ā https://github.com/kdleonard93/creatures-of-habit if you wanna peep the work done since the last article or even since I first started. 495 COMMITS TOTAL!!! Iāve never seen a greener year in my life.
š„² Super hot start and solid second half of the year. Proud of all the hours I put into this.
Whatās Next?
So I have a couple more features that I want to add. One being a streak system, and another being FULLY dynamic quest questions and answers.
Streak System
The streak system was part of the plan since the beginning, but it became the least of my concerns when building this out, and I forgot to include it in my roadmap updates. So I wanted to add that as one of the final touches.
Dynamic Questions
Currently, the questions are partially dynamic. That being there is a bunch of pre-written questions and answers built in, and each quest refresh picks 5 random from the genre it chooses. I donāt want to use any AI for this since I donāt plan to actually make any money from this app to pay for it, so Iām going to need to rewrite my quest logic a bit to give the user a better sense of constant randomness.
After those two things and any bugs that pop up, Iām gonna be pretty much finished! I have the last 2 weeks off of the month, so the goal is to knock out these two things before the new year. Bunch of things are going on in my life outside of this project, so Iām not sweating if itās not fully complete by the time the year is up, but Iāll try to give an update nevertheless.
Until next time āš¾.
