Bubu · Codex Pet

Inspiration

I wanted to turn a simple hand-drawn character into a polished Codex companion without losing the identity that made it charming. Bubu has one round body and three leaves—no arms, legs, wings, or other limbs—so every emotion and movement had to come from the whole body.

What it does

Bubu is a complete Codex Pet v2 with all 9 standard animation states and 16 look directions. Instead of running, Bubu moves through a squash-and-stretch bounce cycle: compress, launch, float, land, and rebound. The package includes a transparent 8×11 WebP spritesheet, pet.json, contact sheet, and per-row GIF previews.

How I built it

I used Codex with the hatch-pet workflow to translate a character identity reference and a plush-material reference into a consistent animated pet. I locked the body proportions, face, palette, texture, and leaf count, generated the required state rows, removed the background, assembled the spritesheet deterministically, and packaged the v2 pet. I then ran visual and machine QA across every row and repaired only the states that failed.

Challenges

The hardest part was preserving identity across many frames while preventing accidental limbs. Directional movement also had to read correctly without traditional walk or run poses. Transparent edges required careful checking for color-key residue, fringe pixels, cropping, fragments, and frame misalignment.

Accomplishments

• All 9 standard animation states completed
• 16 consistent look directions
• No added limbs across the final contact sheet
• Transparent RGBA WebP with zero transparent-RGB residue pixels
• No opaque chroma-key or chroma-fringe pixels in validated frames
• Public repository with installation files and QA artifacts

What I learned

Character consistency works best when identity is treated as a hard constraint rather than a style hint. Deterministic assembly and row-by-row QA made it possible to fix isolated problems without regenerating animation states that had already passed.

What's next

I would like to explore more expressive leaf motion and additional community-created variants while keeping Bubu's strict limbless identity intact.

Built With

• codex