Why I'm making Hibiki No Ikigai

Some games are made to entertain. This one is made to ask a question.

The question is deceptively simple: what is your reason for being?

In Japanese, that question has a name — ikigai (生き甲斐). It describes the intersection of four truths: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what can sustain you. The word itself is made of iki (life) and gai (value, worth, result).

I’ve been turning this idea over for years. Not academically — personally.

Where this started

I was at a crossroads in my own life when I first encountered the concept. The map everyone had handed me — study, work, succeed, repeat — stopped making sense. I had everything I was supposed to want and felt curiously empty.

Ikigai wasn’t a solution. But it was the right shape of question.

What if a game could hold that question? Not give you an answer — games that hand you answers are lectures, not journeys. But what if the mechanics themselves were built around the act of self-discovery?

What kind of game

Hibiki No Ikigai is a top-down RPG. You play as Hibiki, a Rhodesian Ridgeback who wakes in a misty clearing with no memory of how they got there.

A wolf named Mori is waiting.

Mori is the Wise Wolf — guardian of the Awakening. He doesn’t give you a map. He asks you questions. Your answers shape the world you’ll explore: four territories, each embodying a pillar of ikigai, each guarded by a spirit who understands that territory better than anyone.

The game is built in Godot 4. The art is Ghibli-inflected illustration. The dialogue is written by hand.

Why share this now

Because building in public makes you accountable. And because I think the process of making a game about purpose is, itself, an act of living with purpose.

This devlog is a record of that process — the technical and the personal, the breakthroughs and the dead ends.

If you’re building something too, I’d love to hear about it.

— Thuan