alearningcurve / desktop-pet

Virtual Desktop Pet. Made as a gift for my mother

Desktop Pet

This is a python project that makes an interactable desktop pet with animations. Pets are customizable, can have arbitrary amounts of animations, and can easily be added. When run, the pets will cycle animations, move around the sreen by themselve, or be moved by the user's mouse.

Adding a New Pet

To add a new pet one must:

1. Add a new pet in the pets element in the config.xml
2. Add either .gif or .png files to the src/sprites/{pet_name} folder for each animation
3. Define the different animation states the new pet has in src/animations.py as a new function and add it to src.animations.get_animations. Look at the examples of src.animations.get_cat_animations and src.animations.get_horse_animations functions for help.
4. Update the defualt pet in the config.xmlto the pet you just made

After those 4 steps simply run the project and you should see your pet on your desktop!

Installation and Testing

python3 -m venv venv .\venv\Scripts\activate.ps1 pip install -r requirements.txt python run.py

Bundling and Creating an Executable

We are using pyinstaller to create and bundle the stand alone executable. To create a new executable after changing files simply call pyinstaller run.spec while in the venv and the project's root directory. The bundled executable will be in the \dist\DesktopPet folder.

File Not Found Exception? Data files, non-python dependencies such as images, must be added explicitly in the run.spec file. So, if you added such a file that is not in src/sprites you must add it to the datas array in run.spec.