Creating Custom Pets in Codex Desktop: The Bicycle-Riding Pelican Pedalican
Score
74揭示了Codex Desktop宠物功能的内部机制和完整生成流程，对大多数读者是新颖信息。
详细记录了每一步提示和生成结果，图文并茂，结构清晰，展现了扎实的技术实践。
提供了可复用的提示词结构和开源技能参考，对游戏开发者和AI创意从业者直接有用。
文章发布日期是2026年7月14日，涉及的新模型和功能目前可能仍处于早期阶段，时效性较好。
Simon Willison是技术圈知名开发者，博客长期高质量，且代码已开源，信源可信度高。
Base 82 × T2 Source weight ×0.9 = 74
Curation line 70Selected
Why selected
The content is detailed, transparent, technically deep, and practical, from a reliable source, warranting a high score.
AI commentary
「What fascinates me most about this post is how it elevates generative AI from 'drawing pictures' to 'creating animatable game assets', with full transparency and reproducibility. For indie developers and those exploring the frontier of AI creative tools, this is an excellent hands-on tutorial.」
Quick overview
Simon Willison discovered the 'pet' feature in Codex Desktop and used GPT-5.6 Sol with gpt-image-2 to generate a custom animated sprite of a pelican riding a bicycle. He documented the entire prompt engineering and image generation pipeline, releasing all intermediate assets on GitHub. The post details the journey from text description to final sprite sheet, demonstrating how to rapidly create game-ready characters using generative AI.
- Codex Desktop includes a hidden pet feature for creating custom animated sprites.
- A bicycle-riding pelican sprite was generated using GPT-5.6 Sol and gpt-image-2 with multiple animation loops.
- The generation pipeline used carefully crafted prompts and a reference image, outputting a chroma-key sprite sheet.
- Key implementations (hatch-pet and imagegen) are open-sourced under Apache 2.0.
Full text
Showing the source text; the full translation is being generated.
So I did, and now I have a cute little pelican on a bicycle bouncing around my desktop giving me updates on my Codex tasks.
Your browser does not support HTML5 video.
The most interesting thing about this process was watching how the custom pet was created. I told it I wanted a custom pet that was a pelican riding a bicycle and GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh did the rest of the work, using several rounds with gpt-image-2 to generate the necessary sprite assets.
I had it make extensive notes and record all of the intermediary steps. My GItHub repo includes every generated image and combined sprite sheet, plus GIFs for each of the animation loops such as this one, called waving.gif:
That GIF was compiled from a single image generated by gpt-image-2 that looked like this:
And that image was created by executing this prompt against the initial generated character reference image, which was created with this prompt, which has this structure:
Create one clean full-body reference sprite for Codex pet Pedalican.
Pet identity: A compact adorable baby pelican with a round cream-white body, soft coral-orange bill and feet, riding a tiny sky-blue bicycle [...]
Place a single centered pose on a perfectly flat pure magenta #FF00FF chroma-key background. Keep the full pet visible, compact, readable at 192x208, and easy to animate. [...]
I've been looking out for example of ways to use image generation to create simple game-ready sprites, so I spent some time digging into this mechanism to see how it works.
The key implementation details are open source - these two skills in particular, both Apache 2.0 licensed:
And yes, GPT-5.6 Sol did come up with the name "Pedalican". I like it!
Tags: ai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, text-to-image, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, codex
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