PetPal

PetPal — your focus companion

PetPal grew from a simple, playful idea: what if staying focused became a game? A little pixel-art Pokémon settles onto your desktop, keeps an eye on you, and rewards every hour of work. It's a project I share for free — open source, ready to download and tinker with.

A companion living on your screen

A small transparent, borderless window, always on top: your Pokémon floats wherever you drop it, draggable with the mouse. Click it for a word of encouragement, double-click to talk to it. It tucks itself neatly into the system tray when you don't need it.

Focus, turned into an adventure

• Built-in Pomodoro: paced work and break sessions; your companion shifts mood and tells you when to push and when to breathe.
• Evolution through focus: it starts as Piplup, evolves into Prinplup around 10 cumulative hours of focus, then Empoleon around 40. Every hour of work truly counts.
• Task journal: persistent checkboxes to stay on track without leaving your flow.
• Encouragement bubbles: small contextual and spontaneous nudges to keep you motivated.

Fun down to the details

• Customizable pixel art: drop in your own sprites per evolution stage; placeholders are generated automatically in the meantime.
• 3 animation states: base, sleep and action — for a companion with a life of its own.
• Optional local AI (Ollama): a small model running in the background to generate encouragements and chat about your projects, with automatic fallback to scripted messages — fully offline if you want.

Built like a real product

PetPal launches with Windows in one click, continuously saves your progress (focus, pomodoros, tasks, evolution, streak) and stores your data and custom sprites outside the exe: updating is just replacing the file, with nothing lost. Shipped as a standalone exe (no Python to install) via PyInstaller, with an optional Windows installer.

Under the hood

A desktop app in Python and PySide6 (Qt), animated sprites via Pillow, JSON persistence, an Ollama client for the local AI, PyInstaller onefile packaging and an Inno Setup installer. Tested on Windows 11.

It's a gift: download the exe, run it, and let your little penguin watch over your productivity. The code is open if you'd like to take a look or make it your own.