Recovery Quest — Devlog #1: the night this started making sense

Before Recovery Quest was Recovery Quest, it was just a mess on my screen at 1am. Idk how else to put it. Let me back up.

The thought that wouldn’t leave me alone

I was lying in bed, half scrolling, half thinking about nothing, when this question hit me: why does real life not have a UI?

In games I always know exactly where I stand — health bar, stamina, XP, buffs, debuffs. In real life? Nothing. You wake up and wonder “am I tired or just overthinking it” with no number to check. You’re just guessing your own state all the time.

That bugged me more than it should’ve. So I got up, opened my editor, and started typing with zero plan.

The first version was straight up homework

What I had after that session was, with love, extremely boring: a sleep input, a workout log, a nutrition counter.

Nothing different from the five other apps I’d already downloaded and quit on.

Next day I looked at it and realized I’d just rebuilt what I was trying to escape. Cool. Great use of a night.

The dumb little rename that fixed everything

I changed “sleep hours” to “recovery impact.” I changed “workout logged” to “training XP gained.” Same data, same numbers, just different words.

But seeing “+40 training XP” instead of “workout logged” did something weird. It stopped feeling like filling a form and started feeling like leveling up a character. Who is also me.

That tiny change became the seed for everything else.

Once that clicked, I couldn’t stop

After that night I started designing systems for my own life without meaning to. The dashboard became home base. Streaks became a combo system. Recovery score became a condition stat.

None of it was planned, it just kept clicking into place.

I kept things simple: vanilla HTML, CSS, JS, no backend, everything in local storage. I didn’t want infrastructure slowing down an idea I wasn’t even sure about.

And I didn’t want another fitness tracker. There are too many, and most feel identical after week two. I wanted something else — not “what did you do today,” but “what happens if you keep doing this?”

The feature that hit harder than expected

Memory Map started as a throwaway idea — one photo per day on a timeline.

But scrolling back through it later actually hit me. You can watch yourself change, not as stats, but as a person. I went back two weeks once and just stared at it.

Claude was in the room for basically all of this

I didn’t build this alone.

That night I had a feeling and no idea how to turn it into code. So I talked it through with Claude like a senior dev sitting next to me at 1am asking, “okay, but how would this work?”

It helped me figure out recovery scoring, XP scaling, and why my first streak logic kept breaking. Stuff I’d been stuck on just got untangled.

I still wrote the code and made every decision about what this was. But that back-and-forth made me willing to try things I’d normally overthink out of.

Why I kept going

Every time I added something, I’d get that “wait… this is actually a system now” feeling.

Rare enough that I kept chasing it.

Recovery Quest was still rough and missing most of what it has now, but it already changed how I think about habits — not as a checklist, but as mechanics affecting other mechanics.

Hard to go back once you see it that way.

Devlog #1, done. More soon.