Simon Willison accidentally activated a new animated pet in Codex Desktop today, discovering he could now create his own digital companions. The result is Pedalican, a pelican riding a bicycle that bounces across the screen to deliver task updates. Willison used GPT-5.6 Sol to generate the character and sprite assets, relying on a workflow that produced extensive notes and intermediate steps. The process involved multiple rounds with gpt-image-2 to build the necessary animation loops from a single generated image.
This demonstration highlights how specific open source tools within the Codex ecosystem allow users to automate the creation of game-ready sprites. The underlying skills, hatch-pet and imagegen, are both Apache 2.0 licensed and available for public inspection. This workflow shows how a single prompt can drive the entire pipeline from concept to functional animation without manual intervention.
* The pet name Pedalican was generated by GPT-5.6 Sol
* All generated images and sprite sheets are stored in a public GitHub repository
* The animation loops are compiled from single images using a magenta chroma-key background
