Theme 080 · Characters & mascots

Pocket Pet

Pulse is a virtual pet living in a teal egg-shaped keychain with a greenish LCD and three buttons. It gets restless when a metric gets sick — a pixel ‘!’, wide eyes — and waits for you to press A. Dashboards were pets you had to feed; Pulse feeds itself.

readability ●●○trust ●●○effort med

How many dashboards
did you check today?

38 of them · all need feeding

1 · HOOK0:00–0:08

Five grey devices hop in one per beat, each LCD flicking between sleep, charts and a ‘!’; the headline fades in on the 0:04 snare and all screens blink at once on the last beat.

Acme Pulse

2 · REVEAL0:08 (drop)

The teal egg drops in on the drop (squash on landing, 0.25 s), the LCD egg cracks in 3 stepped frames and HELLO! types in; the wordmark slams down from the top on beat 2.

A · ROLL BACK

B · ACK

C · MENU

3 · PROOF MOMENT0:12–0:32

Push-in to the LCD on beat 1; the pet flips to its alert sprite and the ‘!’ blinks in 8ths while −18% ticks down in LCD segments. The thumb presses A on the bar downbeat — button depresses 6 px, screen inverts for one frame.

Acme Pulse

You ship.
Pulse
watches.

Start free

4 · CTA0:36–0:45

The device tilts back in, the pet jumps on each beat with a pixel heart, FIXED IN 6 MIN blinks twice; the tagline and Start free rise one beat apart.

COMPONENT KIT

Egg device — teal glossy shell with keychain loop; the product as an object
LCD pet — Pulse: 1-bit pixel critter with sleep, alert and happy sprites
Status icons — ‘!’, Z’s and hearts borrowed from virtual-pet UI
LCD readout — segment-style mono numbers (CHECKOUT −18%, since 09:42)
A · B · C buttons — physical choice: A = Roll back, B = Acknowledge
Grey herd — a row of grey devices = the dashboards you had to babysit

MOTION · MUSIC

Stepped sprite swap — pet frames switch at 4 fps (every 0.25 s = 8th note at 120 BPM), exactly like the handheld; no tweening on the LCD
Hop & land — devices drop 60 px with a 0.1 s squash (scaleY 0.9) on each downbeat
Button press — A depresses 6 px in 0.06 s, LCD inverts for 1 frame, release on the next 8th

WHY / RISK · ADAPT IT

Why: A virtual pet is the perfect inversion of the pain: dashboards are needy pets you must check; Pulse is the pet that checks itself and calls you only when it matters. The three-button choice makes the human decision tactile. Risk: Nostalgia can read as a toy and LCD text is low-contrast; keep the LCD big in the proof shot and use real numbers.

Adapt to your product: Put your product’s key state on a tiny LCD with one pixel character, map your primary and secondary actions to buttons A and B, and use the grey device row for the tools you replace.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi (egg-shaped handheld, 3 buttons, LCD icons that signal the pet’s needs)