Here is the complete DEV.to post with your YouTube video embedded directly into the Demo section using DEV’s native liquid tag:
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass
What I Built
The Verdant Knight: Chronicles of the Realm is a client-side naturalist RPG designed around zero screen time on outdoor trails.
Most outdoor and fitness applications demand continuous screen engagement—monitoring route metrics, managing social shares, or framing camera angles. The Verdant Knight flips this completely: physical outdoor exploration acts as your crafting bench and leveling system, while your screen stays in your pocket.
Designed for Zero Screen Time: While walking trails, woodlands, or local parks, players keep their phones away. When coming across an interesting natural element, they snap a quick photo using a dedicated shutter button.
Haptic Confirmation: The app triggers tactile vibration pulses (navigator.vibrate([100, 50, 100])) so players can confirm their capture purely by touch without glancing at their screen.
Naturalist Progression Matrix: Specimens map directly to five character RPG stats and gear slots:
Bark & Timber → Defense (DEF), unlocking cuirasses and plated armors.
Foliage & Needles → Agility (DEX), unlocking cloaks and wind-runner mantles.
Stones & Minerals → Strength (STR), unlocking blades and bludgeons.
Flowers & Berries → Wisdom (WIS), unlocking talismans, amulets, and circlets.
Fungi, Moss & Lichen → Endurance (END), unlocking spore shields and sashes.
Dynamic Paper-Doll Pixel Avatars: Gear dynamically equips and renders onto a customized pixel-art canvas.
The Field Codex: Every encounter cataloged logs rarity tiers, scientific classifications, and discoveries directly in offline storage.
Demo
Live Web App: Play The Verdant Knight
Video Walkthrough: Watch Trail Demo on YouTube
Android APK Package: Direct Download on GitHub Releases
Code
tahaenasraoui-debug
/
The-Verdant-Knight-Chronicles-of-the-Realm
An offline-first naturalist RPG powered by on-device open-weight AI (WebGPU). Step outside, photograph the wild, and let nature level up your character sheet—with zero screen time on the trail.
🌿 The Verdant Knight: Chronicles of the Realm
An offline-first naturalist RPG powered by on-device open-weight AI (WebGPU).
Built for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge — Week 1: "Touch Grass".
🎬 Demo
- Live Web App: Play The Verdant Knight
🌲 Overview
Most outdoor applications encourage users to keep their eyes locked on screens—checking GPS waypoints, tweaking camera filters, or browsing social media feeds.
The Verdant Knight flips this dynamic entirely. It is a client-side naturalist RPG where physical exploration acts as your crafting bench and leveling system.
Players explore outdoor trails, woodlands, or local parks with minimal screen interaction. When spotting interesting natural elements, they snap a single photograph. An open-weight vision model processes the image locally on their device, evaluates the specimen, attunes the find to one of five core elemental attributes, and logs the discovery inside a field codex.
📱 Android Installation
Download and install the APK…
How I Built It
The game runs entirely inside the client with zero server dependencies or API keys:
AI Runtime & Local Inference: Powered by Transformers.js v3 (@huggingface/transformers) executing client-side with WebGPU hardware acceleration (with an automatic fallback to WebAssembly SIMD for non-WebGPU environments).
Vision Model Backbone: Uses an open-weight quantized MobileNetV4 neural network (onnx-community/mobilenetv4_conv_small.e2400_r224_in1k). On the very first launch, the browser caches the ~15 MB quantized model into indexed browser cache; from that moment on, all vision classification runs offline.
Pixel-Art Engine: Native HTML5 Canvas handling layered paper-doll asset assembly, procedural palette shifts, and equipment overlay.
Audio Synthesizer: Real-time 8-bit chiptune audio synthesized at runtime using the Web Audio API (no bulky audio files to stream).
Persistence: Entire state, discovered codex entries, player stats, and inventory sync to the browser's localStorage.
Why Does Open Innovation Matters?
Backcountry Offline Execution: The best nature trails, forests, and mountain paths have little to no cellular reception. Cloud-hosted APIs fail the second you lose cell coverage. Open-weight ONNX models paired with in-browser WebGPU run anywhere on Earth without an internet connection.
True Location & Visual Privacy: Trail photographs embed EXIF geolocation tags and personal environmental snapshots. By utilizing open-weight inference locally on the device, no visual feed, metadata, or coordinates ever leave the user's phone.
Zero Marginal Inference Cost: Open innovation allows indie developers to distribute functional AI applications without paying subscription fees or bearing usage token overheads.
Prize Categories
Main Track: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: "Touch Grass"
Team Submissions
Lead & Development: @tahaenasraoui-debug
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