Showcase: Turtle character fork with emotions, treats, and sunrise/sunset cycle

[revopsglobal]

Hey! We've been running a fork of Claude Island for the past few weeks and built some features on top of it that people might enjoy. Sharing in case any of it is useful as inspiration or if anyone wants to grab pieces for their own setup.

The crab is great and we totally get why people love it. But we're turtle people. For anyone else out there who loves turtles, this fork is for you.

Fork: revopsglobal/claude-island

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Sheldon at night

Sheldon on his grass island at night with twinkling stars, walking toward his flower

Close-up: Sheldon approaching his flower on the right side of the notch

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What we added

Turtle character (replaces the crab)

Pixel-art turtle named Sheldon with a full behavioral system:

• Walks back and forth across both sides of the notch (disappears behind it, reappears on the other side)
• Follows your cursor when idle
• Sleeps when no sessions are active
• Blinks, fidgets, and has idle animations
• Eats a flower that regrows (replaces the processing spinner)
• Click to spin him

7-emotion system

Sheldon reacts to what Claude is doing:

• Happy (task completed) -- bright green shell, warm sky
• Sad (errors) -- muted blue-grey shell
• Excited (milestones) -- golden shell
• Confused (retries) -- purple-grey shell
• Curious (research) -- blue-tinted shell
• Emotions decay quickly so they feel like reactions, not permanent moods

Sunrise/sunset day/night cycle

Real astronomical sunrise/sunset times instead of hardcoded hours. Dawn and dusk transitions with gradual sky color changes. Stars, moon, and fireflies at night. Butterflies and clouds during the day.

Spinach treat

Say "feed Sheldon" or "Sheldon's hungry" in Claude Code and a spinach bowl appears. Sheldon walks over, eats the leaves one by one with an excited tail wag, then does happy hops with sparkles.

Environmental elements

• Seasonal particles, shooting stars, rainbows
• Birds, worms, snails, mushrooms
• Rain with puddles, campfire
• Hats: nightcap at midnight (yes, he puts on a little hat before bed), santa in December, party hat for milestones
• Click to spin Sheldon

Other improvements

• Permission bounce animation (Sheldon bounces when approval needed)
• Improved Allow/Deny button hit targets
• Mixpanel removed (no analytics, no TCC permission dialogs)
• Auto-open for AskUserQuestion (submitted as separate PR: Auto-open notch for AskUserQuestion prompts #88)

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Full details in the fork's README.

Great project -- we use it every day. Thanks for building it!

[rawsun007]

Sheldon is great. The sunrise/sunset cycle is a lovely touch.

I went down the same road recently and landed somewhere different that might be worth knowing about: instead of animating sprite frames, I rebuilt the character from its pixel grid and rig the parts. The artwork turned out to separate cleanly into a torso, two eyes, two arms and four legs, so the legs can take real steps, the eyes blink and track the cursor, and it can shut its eyes to sleep, all from the one image and no frame sheets.

Two things that mattered more than I expected:

Legs move in diagonal pairs, not left-pair then right-pair. That's what four-legged animals actually do, and it's the difference between a walk and a shuffle.

Limbs have to overlap into the body, with the body drawn last. Mine had the arms flush against the torso, turning about their inner edge, which opened a wedge of daylight at the shoulder on every swing.

The other lesson was pacing rather than animation. Mine appeared roughly a quarter of every idle minute at first, which is charming for ten minutes and maddening for an afternoon. Every activity now buys a silence proportional to its own length, so a long nap earns a long absence, and it's ambient again.

Mine is ClaudeNotch, a separate app rather than a fork, but the pieces are standalone if you want to read them: PetRig.swift for the gait and limbs, PetEngine.swift for the behaviour and pacing. Both pure functions, easy to lift.