Desk Gremlins

Tiny characters that live on the desktop — not a browser tab, not a menu bar widget pretending to be a pet. A transparent, always-on-top window that walks along the bottom of the monitor, perches on focused app chrome when asked, and opens a radial menu when clicked.

What it is

• Four active gremlins (Ninjoo, Plump, GrungeBot, Zomboi) — each with its own mesh, walk cycle, palette, sample lines, TTS tuning, and inner-ring actions.
• Perch as one-time transport onto a title bar or input area — then idle there until moved.
• Click → radial menu: drop a note to Obsidian, paste clipboard to vault, launch an app, search the web, or ask the gremlin (OpenAI / OpenRouter / hosted proxy).
• Bond-gated inner ring — affection, feed, play, discipline, character-specific gags (throws, slashes, honk).
• Tray-first UX on macOS — optional menubar micro-mode hides the window; tray is the primary surface.

Stack choices

Tauri 2 + SolidJS + Three.js for the pet window. Live2D path exists for future characters (The Countess is designed but held for licensing). Tripo and Quaternius meshes for the current roster — procedural stride when clips don’t exist, per-character movement profiles tuned by hand.

Rust side handles window management: frameless, skips taskbar, multi-monitor aware.

Recent shipping

Past few weeks were animation and presence polish: Fenix flies and freezes wing flap on idle, Plump blob waddle, translucent dialogue bubbles readable on any background, Zomboi re-sliced from demo reel into named subclips, per-character inner wheels on walk cycles.

What’s next

Marketing site + /api/ask proxy on deskgremlins.com (Netlify) for zero-config chat fallback. Commercial licensing for The Countess before she joins the roster. No public desktop download story yet — active development, private repo.