A splash of color

Making a whole little world by yourself means wearing a lot of hats, and the biggest one is easily the art hat. Every pet, every dish, every chair and plant and evolution has to be drawn, cleaned up, and made to sit nicely on a tiny screen. May was all about one question: how do I make HibiTomo look good faster, so I can spend more time on the parts you actually play with?

A smarter art workflow

The honest truth about a solo project is that pixel art is slow. Beautiful, but slow. So this month I built myself a smarter art workflow — a small set of AI-assisted tools that help me sketch, generate, and tidy up sprites much more quickly than doing every frame by hand.

Think of it as a very patient assistant that handles the repetitive bits: roughing out a first pass, cleaning up stray pixels, keeping colors consistent across a whole family of pets. I still make every creative call — what a pet becomes, how it moves, whether it feels right — but I get there in a fraction of the time.

The point isn't to replace the handmade feel. It's the opposite: by speeding up the grind, I free up hours to fuss over the details that matter and to build more actual gameplay. More pets, more furniture, more of the cozy stuff you came for.

Rooms that feel like home from minute one

A brand-new room used to start a little bare, and an empty room isn't very cozy. So I added default furniture sets: when you begin, your pet's home already has a few warm touches in place — somewhere to rest, a bit of character, a starting point you can make your own.

I also gave the room editor some polish this month. Placing, nudging, and arranging your decorations should feel effortless, and it's noticeably smoother now. Decorating is one of my favorite parts of the whole device, so it deserves the extra care.

Little cinematic moments

The last piece was something I'm quietly excited about: special-event animations. These are small cinematic beats — a pet reacting to a moment in a way that feels alive rather than looping the same idle wiggle.

The nice part is how they're set up behind the scenes: I can author these moments as data, which is a fancy way of saying I can add new ones and tweak existing ones quickly, without rebuilding everything each time. More expressive pets, less friction for me. That's the recurring theme of the whole month.

Next up

With a faster art pipeline in place, June is about putting it to work — pouring the saved time straight back into pets, objects, and the world around them. Thanks, as always, for following along.