Haven’t started, still in the planning phase, but I want to build a Tamagotchi for readers. I’m calling it Tome & Tail: a little black dragon living in a pixel-art library on an ESP32-S3 with a small round AMOLED screen.

You’d start a reading session and the dragon would read alongside you. What you read would influence its appearance and habits; lots of sci-fi might give it starry wings, for example. It won’t die if you go a week without reading.

The plan is to keep it playable offline, with optional syncing to Booklary, the reading tracker I’m building. I’m leaning toward C++, which I never used, so it’ll be a learning experience.

Currently waiting for the Waveshare board to arrive so I can start development, and looking for an artist to commission the pixel art. Used GPT to design a concept[1], which I’ll use as examples to the artist.

This will be my first ESP32 project, so getting the dragon blinking on screen is the first milestone.

[1]: https://i.cpimg.sh/57EC5380-0FF7-4646-A943-971350FF98D2.png

Cool idea - I forgot where I found it but there was a cute dragon Tamagotchi clone that I found for Arduino a few years ago.

For ESP32 - recommend paying close attention to the FreeRtos, it's seriously powerful. Even if you are just using Arduino style code you can use it for background scheduling and interrupts (for your api and buttons for example), as well as dual core use on S3.