feat(pets): add the dog as a first-class pet and rename to pixelpets

[JOhnsonKC201]

What this does

The app hosts either a cat or a dog now, switchable from the tray (Pet → Cat / Dog) without a restart. Each species keeps its own coat choice, so switching back and forth never loses your pick.

The dog is not a recoloured cat

src/dog-sprite.js is its own composer set with canine geometry:

• a muzzle that protrudes past the skull line (a cat is flat-faced at this size, and this is the single cue that stops it reading as one)
• ears that hang or perk per breed (floppy, long, semi-perk, big, rose, round)
• a broader chest, a real neck, and short legs on the dwarf breeds
• a smaller head relative to the body than the cat's; an oversized round skull is what made the first pass read as a meerkat

14 breeds ship, and their markings are coat structures rather than palette swaps: spots (Dalmatian), saddle (German Shepherd), tricolour (Beagle), mask (Husky), merle (Aussie), patch (Border Collie), curly rim (Poodle).

Internal edges are carved to . so outlineHalo() traces them, which is the only way the jaw line, ear seams and toe splits survive on solid coats like the Black Lab.

Poses

Five, each the canine answer to the cat's rather than a reuse of it:

Cat	Dog
hunting crouch	play bow (chest down, rump up, tail flagged)
loaf	nose-to-tail curl (a ring, with the tail wrapped over the paws)
rear-up bat	beg (up on the haunches, front paws dangling)
keyboard knead	keyboard lean, snout over the keys

Behaviour

• Fetch. The tray throws a tennis ball; it arcs and bounces under gravity, the dog sprints after it, picks it up, carries it back to its home corner, drops it, then wags and pants.
• A tail that wags from the base, with breed-specific shape (curl / plume / feather / stub / straight) and a rate and amplitude that ride the mood. Cats get their existing slow rolling S-curve.
• Panting with a lolling tongue after exertion, tied to the zoomies band.
• Whiskers suppressed for dogs. A dog with cat whiskers reads as a cat in a dog costume.

Implementation notes

• The active species rewrites the shared PATTERNS / PATTERN_BUILD / TABBY tables in place, so the tray, settings window, custom coats and contact sheet keep working with no knowledge that a second species exists. That kept the diff to the renderer small.
• Face features are now composed after markings. A solid marking was burying the Beagle's eye in the curl pose; the new tests caught it.
• scripts/pet-sheet.js renders every breed x pose to a PNG with no Electron and no canvas dependency, for visual QA (npm run sheet:dog). Reading grid code cannot tell you whether a silhouette actually reads as a dog.

Rename

Product and package are now pixelpets. appId, AppUserModelId and the tmpdir state paths deliberately keep the old identifier: changing them orphans existing installs' settings and would break the identity of the in-flight winget package (JOhnsonKC201.pixelcat, microsoft/winget-pkgs#407879). The GitHub repo name is likewise unchanged, since renaming it would break the release asset URLs that PR points at.

Test plan

• npm test - 27 pass, 0 fail (7 new tests covering breed/build/tail integrity, palette completeness, every breed x every pose composing with a visible body/eye/nose/outline, muzzle-below-eyes geometry, dwarf leg length, and species-registry agreement)
• npm run lint - clean across src/, scripts/pet-sheet.js, tests/
• npm run test:boot - green
• Visual QA via npm run sheet:dog across all 14 breeds and 5 poses
• Manual pass on a real desktop: tray species switch, fetch round trip, wag rates across mood bands

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for GitHub.

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
pixelcat	Ready	Preview, Comment	Jul 29, 2026 7:36am