Finished my first big project — a desktop pet with local AI brain. Here's what I learned building it
Been building this for a few months — Desktop Pet, a pixel-art companion
that actually lives on your Windows desktop.
What it does:
🧠 Local AI brain via Ollama (gemma2:2b) — no API key, works offline
💭 Continuous emotion engine — mood drifts based on hunger/music/time of day
📖 Memory system — tell it your name, it remembers across sessions
🏆 40+ achievements that unlock as you use it
🎤 Voice commands — feed, trick, play music, open apps
🐉 3 pets — dog, dragon, cat — 80+ animations total
It noticed I was coding and said "Do a trick! DO IT!" which felt accurate.
Built with: Pillow, pystray, Tkinter, SpeechRecognition, Ollama
GitHub: https://github.com/chron303/desktop-pet
Download: https://github.com/chron303/desktop-pet/releases/latest
Happy to talk architecture — the emotion engine and sprite rendering
were the most interesting parts to build.