Submission by udi

What we built** **Future Selves** is a voice-first interactive fiction game disguised as a daily ritual. Each day, the player gives the game one word about how they feel, receives a short “transmission” from a possible future version of themselves, and makes one small choice that nudges the story forward. Over time, new future voices unlock, and the cast expands from encouraging voices like **Future Self** and **Future Mentor** to more unsettling possibilities like **The Shadow** and other unchosen futures. **What problem it solves** Most self-improvement tools feel clinical, generic, or guilt-driven. They ask users to track, optimize, and correct themselves. **Future Selves** solves a different problem: it makes reflection emotionally engaging. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with you?”, it asks, “What would the person you’re becoming want to tell you right now?” That makes self-reflection feel intimate, memorable, and motivating rather than dutiful. **The core experience** The hook is emotional contrast. Every future character has a distinct tone, perspective, and voice. **Future Self** sounds warm and grounded. **Future Partner** sounds intimate and vulnerable. **The Flatlined** feels muted and absent. **The Exhausted Winner** sounds polished but hollow. Players feel the difference before they even process the words, which makes the audio itself part of the gameplay. **How it uses ElevenLabs** ElevenLabs is central to the game, not just decorative. Every transmission is turned into character-specific speech using the ElevenLabs text-to-speech API. Each cast member maps to a different voice profile with tuned parameters like stability, similarity, and style, so the voices carry distinct emotional identities. The generated audio is then stored and played back in the app, turning written narrative into a performance the player can hear and feel. **How it uses Zed** We built the project in **Zed** and used it as our primary environment for rapid iteration across the Expo + Convex codebase. Zed’s speed and AI-assisted workflow helped us move quickly between narrative design, backend generation logic, and frontend polish. It was especially valuable for iterating on prompts, refactoring TypeScript across the monorepo, and tightening the game loop fast enough for hackathon pace.