A pet that keeps score.

Most virtual pets want to be fed. Grumble wants to be noticed, and it keeps a written record of whether you did.

The three rules

1. Time is real. Hunger, rest and mood decay on wall-clock time, not on clicks. Close the tab for a day and the creature you return to is genuinely hungrier and grumpier than the one you left. Come back within the hour and nothing happens at all.

2. Growth is not a schedule. There is no day counter for evolution. The five stages — Grub, Grumble, Grumpet, Grizzle, Grizmoor — are paid for in trust, and trust only comes from attention: petting, snacks, play, and focus sessions spent working beside it. A neglected creature never grows up. It just gets older.

3. It writes things down. The desk journal is the point of the whole thing. Leave for nine hours and it will note the nine hours, in its own words, with an opinion attached. Strangers who visit your public page can pat it; that shows up in the journal too, and it will deny enjoying it.

What it isn't

No push notifications, no guilt notifications, no premium currency, no ads, no five-minute cooldowns designed to make you open an app. Crumbs — the only currency — cannot be bought. You earn them by paying attention, which is the joke.

How it's made

One Next.js app. The creature is drawn as SVG rather than a sprite sheet, so it can blink, breathe, track your cursor, and visibly grow a tuft at stage two. State lives in Vercel Blob as plain JSON, one document per keeper, and a cookie session holds the desk together. There is no database and no tracker beyond anonymous page counts.

Longer, more specific writing about how it works lives in the notes.

Also on itch.io — grumblesmith.itch.io/grumble-desk-pet.