Matt Murphy

Side quests

Things I made because I wanted them to exist

Not everything needs a business case. These are the two I work on when a week leaves me with AI tokens to spare.

TourTrip

Stop 01 Web app

Leftover tokens Working title

A trip planner that connects the music to the travel: the shows, the drive between them, and everything along the way.

For me, a show is only half of it. The other half is the trip: the drive between cities, the town you’d never have stopped in otherwise, the morning after the encore.

TourTrip connects the two. It starts with the music: find the shows and multi-night runs worth the drive. Then it builds the trip around them, night by night: the route, where you’re staying, and what’s worth a stop between shows.

Afterwards it keeps the music and the miles together: a passport with a ticket stub for every show and a stamp for every venue and place you visited.

Why I made it

I like live music and I like road trips. This is what happens when you like both.

TourTrip’s homepage. The headline reads “Plan Your Tour Run Like a Pro”, over a photo of a camper van on a winding coastal road. Beside it, an example four-night summer run is shown as an itinerary next to a route map: Mansfield, Saratoga Springs, Clarkston and Chicago, about 1,030 miles and 16 hours 45 minutes of driving. Below the headline, buttons to start planning or browse upcoming shows, and a row of jam bands it’s made for.
TourTrip’s homepage, running on my machine.

What’s built so far

  • Explore shows and multi-night runs by band, venue or city, no account needed
  • Turn the shows you pick into one trip, with a day-by-day plan for stays, transport and stops between shows
  • A trip map with the road route and drive time between shows, on Mapbox, ready for a map key
  • A few real places worth a detour, and a stamp when you visit one
  • A passport: a ticket stub for every show you log, a stamp for every venue, and private notes and photos
  • Share links for the people coming along, without the private details

The shows in it are still sample listings, not real tour dates, and it isn’t live anywhere yet: everything here runs on my machine.

Glint

Stop 02 iPhone game

Leftover tokens

A calm little game where you grow a tree, one small choice a day.

Each day you get a little Glint to spend and a few choices for how your tree grows. You pick one. Whatever you don’t spend is gone by tomorrow, so there’s nothing to hoard.

There’s always a free choice, too: rest, and let the tree get on with it.

Your choices lean the tree toward growth, beauty, resilience or whimsy. Whimsy is where the fairy lights, the glowing mushrooms and the tiny treehouse come in.

A tree takes nine days. Then it joins your grove, and you pick a seed that carries a little of it into the next one.

Two rows of watercolor-style trees on cream paper. The top row runs from a thin sapling to a broad bare trunk with spreading branches. The bottom row shows six trees in leaf: sparse green, fuller green, dense green, pink blossom, mixed autumn colors, and pink fading to purple.
Glint’s trees, straight from the prototype’s art sheet.

What’s built so far

  • A SwiftUI prototype for iPhone
  • The daily choice, the nine-day tree, the grove and the seeds, with tests for the game logic
  • Watercolor-style art for the trees and their extras, made with an AI image generator

That’s the whole trip. Two stops, no business case.

Back to the work

Got an idea?

If it’s the kind of thing that ought to exist, I’d like to hear about it.

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