A design & engineering brief · 04
Auravale
the eight pixies
Talking through feelings with an AI assistant, or even a real therapist, always felt clinical to me. Forms, frameworks, worksheets. I wanted the opposite: a world of whimsy, poetry, and fantasy that could bring magic to my emotions and inner world. So I built one: four realms, eight pixies with real voices, and a grimoire of spells that are secretly the best tools from cognitive science, wearing wings.
The voices
Each pixie was cast in writing first (personality, vocabulary, warmth, pace) and only then given a voice to match. Tap one; she'll introduce herself.
The reframing orbs
Cognitive reframes disguised as spells. Each orb answers a different thought-trap, and each has its own gesture: hold, shake, rub, tap. These are the real ones, the exact code that ships in the app. All eleven:
they live in the grimoire ↗
Realms that feel what you feel
Tell Auravale how you're feeling and your realm repaints itself: twenty hand-directed variants across four realms and five moods, with particle weather that turns harmonious or chaotic to match.
Design notes
- Every spell orb is a real technique from cognitive science, renamed and reskinned until it stops feeling like homework.
- Nothing in the world is allowed to feel clinical. Even the settings page stays in character.
- You tell the world how you feel once, and the light, the color, the particles, and the pixie's tone all shift to match.
Engineering notes
- The pixies take live voice calls: real-time speech in both directions, on a voice pipeline I run myself.
- Eleven interactive orbs in pure SVG and CSS. Six gesture types, no animation library.
- A 4×5 realm-by-mood matrix of art-directed backgrounds, with particle systems that reconfigure between harmonious and chaotic.
- One codebase, shipped to iOS and the web.