Release Notes

What has changed in each release of the Screen Pet Engine demo. The newest release is at the top.

Download the latest demo on itch.io

0.4.0 - Lighter, and a guest pet

August 13, 2026

Elebunn joins the cast. The first collaboration pet, made with the artist Elebunn, now ships with the app. Collab pets live in their own Library tab: yours to keep and run, but the artwork stays the artist’s, so they cannot be edited or exported.
Start from a built-in pet and make it yours. Select any built-in pet or object and press Clone to get an editable copy. The original stays untouched, so you can experiment without losing the pet you started from.
Much lighter when it is just sitting in the tray. Closing the Library now releases the memory it was holding on Windows, so the app takes far less of your machine while your pets carry on as usual.
Easier on your processor in the background. The app does noticeably less idle work when no pets are out, and the Library is quicker to open and browse. Pets still get out of the way of fullscreen apps just as fast.
Custom pet icons stop breaking. Resizing or tagging a pet could leave a broken image on its card in the Library. Affected pets repair themselves the next time you launch, with nothing for you to redo.
Item descriptions are visible at last, with any link in them clickable straight through to your browser.

July 20, 2026

Your pets react to you. A new On Click node lets a pet respond when you click it, and a new Emit Hearts effect makes it shower floating hearts. Every built-in pet is pettable out of the box.
Start from a template, not a blank canvas. Four quick-start pet templates give you a working behavior in one click.
Right-click any pet to control it. Hide it, bring it to the front, send it to the back, or reset an object’s position, straight from the pet on your screen, on macOS and Windows.
A friendlier behavior editor. Drag from a node’s output onto empty canvas to create and auto-connect the next node, and the add-node menu flips to stay on screen near the edges.
Hide All Pets, one switch. The master hide control is now in both the Library and Settings.

July 16, 2026

Pets stay put when your Dock or taskbar changes. Resize or move the Dock on macOS or the taskbar on Windows, or toggle its auto-hide, and every pet instantly re-seats on the correct floor instead of stranding above or under it.
Instant fullscreen hide on Windows. Pets get out of the way the moment an app goes fullscreen, such as games, video, or presentations, matching macOS.
Steadier drag and drop. Flinging a pet past a screen edge no longer teleports it, and a pet dropped mid-animation keeps falling correctly.
Smoother behavior editor. Node connectors are easier to grab, single-click select works right after editing a node’s fields, and the sprite picker no longer leaves the wrong sprite when you switch nodes.
New website and user manual. A full documentation site is now live at screenpetengine.com.
Fixed a startup issue that stopped the app opening on some macOS machines.

July 11, 2026

Pets get out of your way. A new Hide All Pets master switch, and pets now auto-hide when an app goes fullscreen, such as games, video, or presentations, on macOS as well as Windows.
Report a problem in one click. The Diagnostics panel in Settings can now export logs for bug reports.
Smoother, steadier animation. A reworked per-pet animation player with no flicker at loop boundaries and instant, clean behavior restarts.
Friendlier sprite importing. GIF imports pre-fill their frame rate, and slow imports show progress with a cancel button.
Faster on Windows. Sprite and action swaps no longer re-decode every frame, cutting CPU on busy scenes.
Join the community. A Discord invite now lives in the About screen.

July 7, 2026

The first public demo of Screen Pet Engine, for macOS and Windows.

Desktop pets. Run animated pets that walk along the bottom of your screen, sit above the Dock or taskbar, and can be picked up and dropped anywhere, then fall with gravity and resume what they were doing.
Behavior editor. Design what a pet does with a visual node editor and five building blocks: Start, End, Idle, Walk, and Random.
Bring your own art. Import sprites from GIF or PNG, with an inline slicer for cutting sprite sheets into frames.
Objects and props. Place animated objects and props on your screen alongside your pets.
A ready-made library. Switch built-in pets and objects on or off from the Library.