Cozy Virtual Companion

This virtual cozy mouse companion is what happens when you go a little overboard on a simple class assignment… I can’t help but build something fun whenever I’m given the opportunity! This interactive virtual environment takes inspiration from the style of lo-fi video games, with an intentionally pixelated aesthetic and a custom-designed character and environment. I created the first pass of all the graphics in Procreate on my iPad, then used ChatGPT’s image generation tools to develop multiple angles and poses for the mouse character, as well as different views of the mouse house. From there, I moved into Photoshop to composite the character poses into the scene and create multiple frames for the fire and TV animations to bring a little more movement into the environment. I then fed those keyframes and alternate poses into Claude in VS Code to connect the animations and user interactions, as well as plot simple walking routes for the mouse around the room.The mouse switches between different activities on its own every 5–15 minutes, but users can also press buttons to trigger specific activities or play some cozy fall jazz in the background. The project is open source on my GitHub, so feel free to let this little mouse become your new work or study buddy!