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.

I’ll look into that, thanks! Right now I’m studying the Tamapoke[1] codebase, which should give me lots of ideas and help me get started.

[1]: https://github.com/socquique/TamaPoke

I meant dinosaur tamagotchi - I cannot find it on github though