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Devlog #2 — Making Hoshi Feel More Alive 🌱

This week wasn’t about adding flashy new features.

It was about replacing temporary systems with foundations that can scale.

🎞️ A new animation engine

One of the biggest changes was completely rewriting Hoshi’s animation system.

The original implementation relied on procedural movement (Math.sin breathing, mouse tracking, texture swapping…), which worked for early testing but didn’t feel right.

Instead, Hoshi now uses a frame-based animation engine.

Every animation is built from independent sprite frames that are loaded once and simply toggled on/off during playback. This makes the renderer much cleaner while avoiding runtime texture swapping entirely.

Current animations include:

Idle breathing
Happy
Curious
Sleepy
Automatic blinking

The idle animation is already available for all eight directions.

😊 Hoshi can finally react

Hoshi is no longer just an animated sprite.

It now reacts when you interact with it.

Clicking makes Hoshi happy.
Double-clicking “pets” Hoshi, increasing affection and happiness.
Temporary “forced animations” can override the normal behavior state for a few seconds.

This small system will become the basis for future interactions between the user and Hoshi.

💾 Persistence

Hoshi can now remember who it is.

A new persistence layer automatically saves:

Emotions
Personality traits
Recent memories
User settings

Everything is restored automatically when Hoshi starts again.

This is the first step toward making Hoshi feel like a persistent companion instead of a temporary application.

⚙️ Desktop integration

Hoshi is slowly becoming part of the operating system.

This update adds:

Native desktop notifications
Launch on system startup
Persistent settings
Toggleable HUD

The goal is for Hoshi to quietly live alongside the user instead of behaving like a normal application window.

🧩 Behind the scenes

A lot of work also went into restructuring the codebase.

New modules now separate responsibilities into:

Animation
Persistence
Desktop integration
Settings
Rendering

This should make future features much easier to build and maintain.

What’s next?

The next major milestone is making Hoshi feel less scripted.

That means working on the first version of the Behavior Engine, where emotions, memories and context begin driving Hoshi’s decisions instead of simple state changes.

Every update gets Hoshi one step closer to feeling like a tiny living companion instead of just another desktop app.