Joey: The Roocode Sidekick

Joey is an animated virtual pet that interacts with Roocode! He helps keep you company during long coding sessions and can keep track of your Roocode stats.

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Inspiration

Clippy, Tomagotchi, bonzi buddy, Bongocat!

What it does

Joey is a virtual pet that connects to Roo and can react to whatever you are doing. If you switch modes, Joey will put on the outfit to match! Hardhat for architect mode, keyboard for coding, etc. If you aren't working, Joey gets bored and bounces on his tail. Whenever Roo is working and using tools, Joey will react. For example, while in code mode, Joey sits patiently at the computer. However, if Roo is writing/editing files, Joey is fast at work typing on his keyboard. Additionally, Joey keeps track of all your Roo stats. Number of tokens used, number of tool calls made, number of mode switches, etc. Using this information, there are built in achievements (that will unlock cosmetics in the future updates).

How we built it

Primarily used Gemini 2.5 Pro for the coding, and Gemini 2.5 Flash Image for the artwork. I did some artwork touchup and created a sprite sheet in Photoshop.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the information from Roocode to my extension took a while. Using Gemini, it kept having trouble, but eventually I was able to do research of the codebase myself to prompt Gemini in the right direction.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works! And does most of what I wanted, including some things I didn't know were going to be part of the project at the beginning. At first I just wanted Joey to animate along with Roo as it worked. But then I found I could do some usage tracking and gamify the extension a little by adding achievements. Overall, I think it came out really cool.

What we learned

I've never made a VS code extension so that was completely new to me. I also got to dig into the Roocode codebase for the first time which was cool. Finally, I learned a lot about prompting Gemini 2.5 Flash Image to get it to give me the result I wanted - until I got rate limited :)

What's next for Joey: The Roocode Sidekick

I really wanted to get unlockable cosmetics, but between artwork and coding, I just didn't have time. Ideally, Joey would be fully customizable with cosmetics that are unlocked as you reach different milestones with Roo (total number of tokens used, number of times Debug mode was used, etc.) The artwork and animations need proper polish Also, I'd love to add some AI features - maybe I can connect Joey to a free/local LLM and he can make short comments to you based on what your prompting in Roo.

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