Inspiration
After the last couple of years of isolation and stress, we wanted to build something fun!
What it does
This project puts an interactive chinchilla monster on your desktop. It runs around, demands pets, sleeps, texts you if you leave it alone for too long (aka your desktop was left unlocked), and occasionally becomes a raging, mouse-stealing monster. :)
How we built it
It's a local app written in Python that uses Tkinter for the GUI and pyautogui for the mouse interaction. It also uses Twilio's API to send SMS messages if the desktop is left open for too long. We custom-made the sprites in Piskel.
Challenges we ran into
This is really not what Tkinter is designed to do. Like at all. Each movement of the monster is achieved by moving a small window. Initially, we wanted to have the chinchilla munch files that are drag'n'dropped into its mouth, but we scaled it back because we couldn't find a way to get the libraries we were using to work with that. It was also tricky to get the animations to line up how we wanted them.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- It's cute!
- We had fun building it!
- It works better than we thought it would.
- As people who almost never deal with GUIs of any kind, we got a chance to work with GUIs in a very new way.
What we learned
- That
Tkinteris weird. - That
pyautoguiis both weird and wonderful. - How to work with GUIs.
- Making sprites is hard.
What's next for Desktop Monster
- Choices for the type of monster
- More interactions
- "Eating" (deleting) files that are dropped onto it
- Reduce mouse speed when the chinchilla is on top of it
- Have the chinchilla sleep when the program detects music playing or dance if the music is happy
- Click dragging the chinchilla to move it across the screen
- Testing on multiple systems to make sure it works well in general
Judging
Backup Demo Link
Domain.com
desktop-pest.tech
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