This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass
What I Built
NPC — Nature's Personal Companion 🌿 is a small AI-powered field game designed to get people off their screens and into the real world.
Most AI tools give you another reason to stay on your screen. NPC does the opposite.
You tell it:
- 📍 Where you are
- ⏱️ How much time you have
- 🧠 Your current mood
- 👥 Who you're with
Gemma then turns that information into a Field Assignment: a temporary persona, a mission, several objectives, a special rule, and a completion condition.
You might become a Wildlife Detective, Urban Explorer, Sound Collector, or Tiny Things Investigator.
The idea is simple: the AI gives you the quest, and then you put the screen away.
NPC is designed for anyone who feels bored, stressed, stuck in a routine, or simply needs an excuse to pay more attention to the world around them.
Demo
You tell NPC:
Where: University campus
Time: 20 minutes
Mood: Bored
Company: A friend
NPC might respond:
🪪 FIELD ASSIGNMENT
Persona: Campus Cartographer
Mission: Your campus has more landmarks than you think. Explore the area around you and build a mental map using only things you notice along the way.
Objectives:
- Find three things that could serve as landmarks.
- Notice something you have walked past before but never really looked at.
- Find two different sounds coming from different directions.
- Compare one part of the campus with another.
🚫 Field Rule: No photographs. Your memory is the map.
✅ Mission Complete When: You and your companion can describe your route and three things you noticed that you probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
Your phone has done its job.
Now go.
Code
The complete source code is available on the GitHub Repository:
theikosB
/
nature-personal-companion
An open-source AI field companion that turns ordinary places into small adventures. For submission to Hacktoberfest 2026 Week 1 Challenge: Touch Grass
NPC 🌿
Nature's Personal Companion
Most AI wants you to stay on your screen. This one wants you to leave it.
NPC (Nature's Personal Companion) is a tiny AI-powered field game that turns an ordinary place into a small adventure.
Tell NPC where you are, how much time you have, your mood, and who you're with. It gives you a field persona, a mission, and a set of objectives designed to make you notice and interact with the world around you.
Then you put your phone away and go complete the quest.
Because sometimes you need an NPC to tell you to touch grass. 🌱
🎮 What does NPC do?
NPC generates a personalized real-world Field Assignment based on your situation.
You choose:
- 📍 Where you are — park, campus, city, neighbourhood, waterfront, etc.
- ⏱️ How much time you have — from 5 to 60 minutes
- 🧠 Your…
The project is intentionally lightweight:
- Python + Flask backend
- Vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript frontend
- Gemma for AI generation
- No database
- No accounts
- No GPS tracking
How I Built It
The core of NPC is Gemma, an open-weight AI model accessed through the Google GenAI API.
The basic flow is:
Choose your surroundings
↓
Choose your time + mood + company
↓
Gemma
↓
Field Assignment
↓
Go outside 🌿
Gemma isn't just being used as a chatbot or as an optional feature. It is responsible for generating the actual game experience.
The Flask backend takes the user's four inputs and constructs a structured prompt containing the user's situation and safety constraints. Gemma generates a structured JSON response containing:
Persona
Mission
Objectives
Special Rule
Completion Condition
The frontend then turns that response into an interactive Field Assignment card.
The application is deliberately small so that the AI remains the interesting part of the project rather than hiding behind a large technical stack.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
NPC is built around a simple idea: AI can be useful even when its goal is to make you stop using AI.
Open models make experimentation with ideas like this much more accessible. Instead of building a product around a black-box conversational interface, developers can experiment with how an AI model behaves when it is given a very specific role and responsibility.
For NPC, that means treating the model as a game designer and field-assignment generator, rather than simply asking it to have a conversation with the user.
Open innovation makes these kinds of small, unconventional experiments possible: developers can take an AI model and build something playful around it without needing to reproduce an entire AI platform.
Prize Categories
- Best Use of Gemma
NPC uses Gemma as the core AI model responsible for generating personalized real-world field assignments.
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