👨‍💻 DevGotchi — Gamify Your Coding Sessions

DevGotchi turns VS Code into a cyberpunk RPG. It's a free productivity + gamification extension that tracks your focus, energy, and motivation in real time through a living developer avatar — no telemetry, no accounts, no external servers. (The one exception is opt-in: claiming a sponsor reward asks GitHub to confirm your sponsorship, and only when you click it.)

Save files and push commits to earn XP and Coffee Beans. Let your stats decay and you'll hit burnout — a real mechanic with consequences, not just a number. Level up, build a daily streak, unlock 15 achievements, fight three real bosses tied to your actual repo state, and Prestige once you hit the cap.

Code is a Martial Art.

✨ Features

🎮 Core RPG Loop

• Live Avatar — Your developer reacts to your coding habits in a dedicated side panel.
• Four Stats — Focus 🎯, Motivation ⭐, Energy ⚡, and Health 💪 decay over time and are boosted by activity.
• XP & Leveling — Earn XP for saves, commits, and bug fixes. Level up from Junior to Legendary Dev.
• Coffee Economy — Coffee Beans are your currency. Earn them by coding, spend them on upgrades.
• Mood System — Your developer's mood shifts: 🚀 Productive → 😰 Stressed → 😴 Tired → 💀 Burnt Out.

🧙 Character Classes

Pick a class the first time you open the panel — it's free, and it sets a permanent passive bonus:

Language Affinity works from the language VS Code detects for each file you save. Saving in your class's home turf earns +50% save XP, which stacks with the Rogue's save bonus. You'll see a quiet status-bar flash (🛡️ Infra affinity ✦ +5 XP (shellscript)) and a ✦ next to the language in the Activity Log. There's no penalty for other languages. A few file types VS Code only knows as plain text without an extra extension installed (.tf, .nix, Dockerfile, Makefile…) are still recognized by filename.

Your class also retints your avatar in the panel scene (hoodie + glow color), so your build is visible at a glance. Changed your mind? Respec anytime from the Shop for 200 ☕.

⏱ Focus Sprint

A real Pomodoro-style timer, not just a decoration:

• Start a 15, 25, or 50-minute sprint from the panel or Command Palette ("DevGotchi: Start Focus Sprint").
• Earn 1.5× XP on everything while it's running, and your Focus stat decays 50% slower.
• Finishing awards a completion bonus (+40 XP, +25 ☕). Cancelling early forfeits it — same incentive as a real Pomodoro.
• A live countdown shows in both the panel and the status bar.

☠️ Burnout State

When your health hits zero, full burnout kicks in:

• The UI shifts red with a glitch overlay and a critical warning banner.
• Most actions are locked — you can only Take a Break or Drink Coffee to recover.
• Recovering from burnout earns you the Back from the Edge achievement.

😴 Idle Detection

Going to lunch shouldn't tank your stats. If there's no real editor activity (typing, cursor movement, switching files, regaining window focus) for 10 minutes, DevGotchi reads that as AFK — stat decay pauses and your avatar visibly falls asleep instead of draining the whole time you're away from the keyboard. The moment you're back, everything resumes normally.

👾 Boss Fights

The panel's boss card isn't just decorative — it becomes a real boss tied to your actual repo/editor state, not a simulated fight. Three bosses share the card, in priority order (highest shown when more than one is active):

1. 🐙 Merge Conflict Kraken — HP is the real count of files with unresolved git merge conflicts (Conflict Tentacle → Merge Kraken → Rebase Leviathan → Git Cthulhu). A live conflict blocks work, so it always takes priority.
2. 🐛 Bug Boss — HP is tied 1:1 to your actual active lint/build error count (Syntax Wraith → NullPointerDemon → StackOverflow Behemoth → Overwhelmulus). Fixing an error does real damage; the soundtrack itself intensifies as this one grows — see 🎵 Room Music below.
3. 🧟 Code Smell Boss — HP is the count of currently-open files over 300 lines (Spaghetti Sprite → Code Smell Ooze → Legacy Behemoth → Technical Debt Titan). Only scans files you actually have open, not the whole repo. The lowest-priority boss — it only shows once nothing more urgent is going on, matching "the chore everyone postpones."

Clearing any of them to 0 defeats the boss for a bonus (+30 XP, +15 ☕), and counts toward your lifetime bosses-slain total (see 🎁 Year in Code Wrapped). No active boss? The card reverts to the standard health-based Burnout Boss.

📊 Weekly Recap

Once a week, DevGotchi surfaces a quick summary of what you actually did: XP earned, commits, bugs fixed, focus sprints completed, level progress, and your current streak. Silent if you didn't code that week — no guilt-tripping, just a recap. The notification includes a Share Recap action that turns it into the shareable Weekly Recap card (see Share Your Progress below).

🏅 Achievements

15 unlockable badges tracking your milestones:

🌟 Prestige

Leveling caps at Level 50. Once you hit it, a 🌟 PRESTIGE button appears — resets you back to Level 1 ("Junior Developer" again) in exchange for a permanent, stacking +5% XP bonus per prestige. Your lifetime stats, streak, achievements, and inventory are untouched; only level/XP resets. The classic idle-game retention loop, now with your actual coding activity behind it.

⚡ Random Events

Every 30-second tick, there's a chance of a surprise event — good or bad:

• "Found a forgotten coffee stash! +20 beans"
• "Production incident! −Energy −Motivation"
• "Rubber duck debugging breakthrough! +Motivation"
• "Git blame points at you. −Motivation"
• ...and more. Stay on your toes.

📡 Activity Log

A live scrollable feed inside the panel showing every recent XP gain, achievement unlock, random event, and level-up — colour-coded by type. A 📋 Standup button right in the log header turns today's entries into a ready-to-paste "what I did today" post (see Share Your Progress below).

🏙️ Unlockable Rooms

The pixel-art scene moves with you as you level up — each room has its own art and its own soundtrack:

By default you move in to each new room the moment it unlocks. Click the room badge on the scene to hop between unlocked rooms, or pin one (or switch back to Auto) from the Shop. Prestiging never takes a room away.

🎵 Room Music

Procedurally synthesised ambient music generated entirely with the Web Audio API (no external files). Every room has its own tempo, scale, instruments and drum pattern (see Unlockable Rooms above). Switching rooms while music is playing carries over at the next bar. The original Neon Dojo track has:

• Driving kick & hi-hat pattern
• Walking A-minor bass line
• Pentatonic arpeggio with stereo movement
• Slow-swelling pad chords every 2 bars
• Sparse synth lead phrase every 4 bars

Dynamic Boss Music: in every room, the whole mix intensifies as the Bug Boss grows — double-time kicks, a brighter/louder bass and arp, urgent 16th-note fills, and a low pulsing alarm siren once it's past 80% HP. The 🎵 icon flips to 👾 while it's playing in boss mode.

Toggle it on/off with the 🎵 Music button. Fades in and out smoothly.

🆘 Rescue Missions

Come back after 3+ days without touching the editor (and not on Vacation Mode) and your developer has been stranded. Cobwebs and dust cover the scene, an SOS beeps, and a Rescue Mission banner appears:

• 🧹 Blow the dust off: save 5 files
• 🧠 Reboot the brain: code for 15 minutes
• 📡 Send a signal home: make 1 commit

The dust clears as each objective fills in. Finishing all three brings them home with fully restored stats, bonus XP and ☕ that scale with how long you were gone (up to +200 XP / +100 ☕), and half of the streak your absence broke back. The first rescue unlocks 🛟 Welcome Home.

It's a welcome-back moment, not a punishment: starting a mission costs nothing, and there's no failure state. An unfinished mission quietly retires after 7 days. Planned time off? Turn on Vacation Mode and no mission triggers at all.

🔊 8-bit Sound Effects

Chiptune SFX, synthesised the same way as the music (no audio files), for the moments that matter:

They play whether or not music is on, and while the panel is open even in a background tab, so you hear the chime as you save. Big moments come first and they never pile up: a save that also levels you up plays the fanfare, then the achievement, not four sounds at once. Choose All, Milestones only (no per-save chime) or Off under ⚙️ Settings → 8-bit sound effects. Some webviews block audio until you first click inside the panel.

📜 Daily Quests

Three randomised quests refresh each day:

• Save files, push commits, fix bugs, or log coding time.
• Completing all three awards a streak bonus that grows over consecutive days.

📅 Daily Login Calendar

A new 📅 Calendar view overlays a repeating 30-day cycle on top of your login streak — log in on consecutive days to climb the calendar, and Day 30 of every cycle pays a big one-time bonus (+100 XP, +100 ☕) on top of your normal daily reward.

📖 The Legacy Code Dungeon

A 7-chapter narrative questline, reachable from the new 📖 Story button. Each chapter is one objective (save/commit/fix/time — the same shape as a daily quest) wrapped in its own flavor text:

1. The Crumbling Entrance
2. Whispers in the Changelog
3. The Dependency Crypt
4. Echoes of Deprecated Code
5. The Merge Conflict Labyrinth
6. The Refactor's Reckoning
7. The Legacy Core

Completing a chapter's objective starts a next-day gate — the following chapter only unlocks once a new calendar day begins, so the full arc plays out over at least 7 real days instead of being grindable in one sitting. Finish all 7 and you earn the exclusive 💀 Legacy Slayer skin.

🎁 Community Quest Packs

Import a shareable set of themed quests — plain JSON, no code, ever:

• DevGotchi: Import Quest Pack from File — zero network calls, the default way to import.
• DevGotchi: Import Quest Pack from URL — opt-in, with an explicit confirmation dialog disclosing the exact URL before anything is fetched. This is the only thing in DevGotchi that ever makes a network request, and only when you ask it to.
• Every field is strictly validated (bounded targets/rewards, allow-listed quest types) and HTML-escaped before it's ever stored, since this is the one place DevGotchi consumes content someone else wrote.
• Two example packs ship in this repo's quest-packs/ folder — 100 Days of Code and a Hacktoberfest Quest Pack (a separate, stackable coffee-bean track from the built-in seasonal Hacktoberfest event, which has its own exclusive skin). Point someone at a raw GitHub URL to one of these (or write your own) to share it.
• Imported quests show in a new 🎁 Quest Packs section of the Quests modal, with a "remove" link per pack.

🎲 Boss Affixes

A Diablo-rift-style weekly mutator, shown as a banner on the panel — deterministically picked from the ISO week number, so it changes automatically every Monday with no server, no scheduling, and no persisted state. Mostly positive/flavorful (Sprint Surge, Boss Rush, Quest Rally, Iron Streak, Slow Burn, Caffeine Week), plus one that ties into something you already control directly: Double Trouble, where active bugs drain stats twice as fast.

💼 Timesheet Mode

A new 📊 Export Timesheet button in Settings exports your real coding time as a billable-hours CSV. It's tracked the same "ignore offline/idle time" way quest time already was, so it reads as actual coding time, not just "VS Code was open" time. Pick a range (7/30/90 days, or all tracked history) and get a Date,Hours CSV — no rate applied, just honest hours to plug into your own invoicing.

🎯 Mini-Games (Challenges)

⚡ Skill Tree

Unlock passive abilities with Coffee Beans:

• Caffeine Tolerance — Coffee restores 50% more energy
• Iron Focus — Focus decays 30% slower
• Bug Slayer — Earn 2× XP when fixing bugs

🛍️ Shop

Spend beans on skins and gear that affect your stats:

• Business Suit 🕴️, Space Suit 👨‍🚀, Code Wizard 🧙, Debug Ninja 🥷, Autobuild Mode 🤖, Alien Contractor 👽, Night Shift 🧛, Principal Engineer 🤴
• Ergo Chair (energy decays slower), Mech Keyboard (motivation decays slower)
• Equipped skins show up everywhere your avatar does — the panel, and every shareable card.
• Class Respec — switch your Character Class for 200 ☕, right from the same Shop list.

📅 Activity Calendar

A GitHub-contribution-graph-style heatmap on the main panel, showing your last year of DevGotchi activity at a glance — every XP-earning action (saves, commits, bug fixes, quests, boss defeats) lights up that day's cell. Drawn straight to canvas, no server, no separate tracking to opt into.

🎉 Seasonal Events

A year-round calendar of recurring, time-boxed events — each lives automatically every year on the same real-world date(s), no manual reset needed:

Every skin is limited — earned only, never purchasable. A themed banner appears on the panel while its event is active, with progress also shown in the Quests modal; both disappear once the window ends.

🔗 IDE Integrations

• Status Bar — Level, mood emoji, and stat summary always visible.
• Git — Commits award +50 XP and +5 beans automatically.
• Linter — Fixing errors awards XP; active errors slowly drain your stats.

📤 Share Your Progress

Four shareable cards, all rendered locally — zero telemetry, nothing leaves your machine except the file you choose to save or the text you choose to paste:

• 🕹️ Stats Card — a cyberpunk-styled PNG of your level, XP, streak, and lifetime stats.
• 📊 Weekly Recap — a GitHub-contribution-graph-style card of your last year of activity, with this week's XP/commits/bugs fixed/focus sprints called out and the current 7-day column outlined.
• 🎁 Year in Code Wrapped — a Spotify-Wrapped-style annual card: lifetime total XP, bosses slain, longest streak ever, and your most productive coding hour (with a flavor tag like Night Owl 🦉 or Early Bird 🐦). Fires as a one-time notification roughly once a year; reopen anytime from this tab.
• 📋 Standup — turns today's Activity Log into a ready-to-paste "what I did today" post for Slack, your class/avatar emoji included.

🐦 Flex This does both halves of a post in one click: copies a pre-written, hashtag-ready caption to your clipboard and immediately prompts to save the matching card image — paste the caption, attach the image, done.

The classic options are still there for the Stats Card and Weekly Recap: 📋 Copy as Markdown (a stats block for your GitHub profile README or a PR description) and 🖼️ Save as Image (just the PNG, no caption).

⚙️ Settings

A new Settings button on the panel (and DevGotchi: Open Settings) lets you tune the experience:

• Weekly Recap notifications — turn the weekly summary popup on/off (it still logs to the Activity Log either way).
• Reduce achievement notifications — suppress achievement-unlock popups if they feel like noise; achievements still unlock and log normally.
• Stat decay speed — Relaxed, Normal, or Intense, for a more forgiving or more high-stakes pace.

💾 Progress Export/Import

Your progress lives in VS Code's local storage, but you can move or back it up:

• DevGotchi: Export Progress — saves your full save (stats + settings) as a portable JSON file.
• DevGotchi: Import Progress — restores from a previously exported file, after an explicit confirmation since it overwrites your current save.
• Both are also available as buttons inside the Settings panel. Fully local — no accounts, no server round-trip.

🌴 Vacation Mode

Going away for a few days shouldn't cost you your streak or leave your dev burnt out when you get back:

• Toggle it in Settings (or DevGotchi: Toggle Vacation Mode) — takes effect immediately.
• While on: stat decay, burnout, and streak-breaking are all frozen. A banner on the panel reminds you it's active.
• Turn it off when you're back and everything resumes exactly where it left off — no penalty for the time away.

💬 Feedback

A "Send Feedback / Report a Bug" link at the bottom of the Settings panel (and DevGotchi: Send Feedback) opens the GitHub issues page directly — the fastest way to reach me with bugs or ideas.

💖 Buy the Dev a Coffee

A 💖 Sponsor button in the action grid (and another link in Settings) opens GitHub Sponsors and, once per day, grants a small in-game coffee-bean bonus (+25 ☕) just for checking it out. Actual sponsors can run Claim Sponsor Reward (also linked in Settings): it uses VS Code's built-in GitHub sign-in, only when you click it, to ask GitHub directly whether you sponsor the project — no DevGotchi server involved. A verified sponsorship pays +500 ☕ once per GitHub account, then +100 ☕ each time you claim again 30+ days later while still sponsoring. Monetization framed as a game mechanic, never a paywall. DevGotchi stays free forever either way. Exported share cards carry a small "tip the dev" footer, and DevGotchi asks once — when you unlock Legendary Dev or a 30-day streak — with a Don't Ask Again that means never. It's skipped entirely if Reduce Notifications is on.

👥 Team Mode

See your teammates' progress without any server, accounts, or DevGotchi backend — it's synced entirely through git:

• Turn it on in Settings (or DevGotchi: Toggle Team Mode). Only available for repos with more than one contributor.
• Your progress gets written to .devgotchi/team/<you>.json inside the repo. DevGotchi never runs git commands that change anything — you commit and push it yourself, the same way you already share every other file.
• A new 👥 Team button opens a view of everyone who's enabled it: name, level, and streak, pulled from whatever's currently on disk (as fresh as your last git pull).
• Team Raid Boss: once there's more than one teammate, the Team view also shows a shared HP bar — the whole team's combined active error count. Clear it together (drive the combined count to 0) and the first person to check the Team view after that gets a bonus (+25 XP, +20 ☕), then a fresh fight starts.
• Raid Boss MVP: during a fight, the Raid Boss card shows each teammate's damage (bugs fixed since the fight started) with a 🏆 MVP tag on whoever leads; ties share it. When the boss falls, the final board stays up until the next fight and the clear toast names the MVP ("🏆 You were the MVP with 4 fixes!"). It's all worked out from the same git-synced snapshots, so it updates as teammates push. Damage is counted from when someone first opens the Team view during a fight, and it uses each teammate's lifetime bug-fix counter, so fixes in other projects during the fight count too.
• Worth knowing: this makes your stats visible to anyone with access to the repo — it's an explicit opt-in, not a default.

🚀 Getting Started

1. Install the extension.
2. Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P).
3. Run "DevGotchi: Open Panel".
4. Your developer appears in the side column. A tutorial walks you through each feature.

🛠 Commands

🎨 Panel Layout

┌──────────────────────────────────-───┐
│  Avatar │ Name · Role                │
│         │ LEVEL N  ████░░ XP         │
│         │ ☕ Beans   🔥 Streak        │
├───────────────────────────────-──────┤
│ ◈ Stats                              │
│  🎯 Focus      ████████░░  82        │
│  ⭐ Motivation ██████░░░░  65        │
│  ⚡ Energy     ████░░░░░░  42         │
│  💪 Health     ██████████  100       │
├──────────────────┬───────────────-───┤
│ ◈ Active Quest  │ ☠/🐛/🐙/🧟 Boss    │
│  Ship Something │  Overwhelmulus     │
│  ████░░ 60%     │  ██████░░ 300 HP   │
├────────────────────────────────────-─┤
│ ◈ Focus Sprint      [1.5x XP]        │
│         18:42 remaining              │
├─────────────────────────────────────-┤
│ ☕ 🎯 🌴 ⚡ 🛍️ 🏆 📜 🎵 🏅 📅 📖 📡 📤 ⚙️ 👥 💖│  (👥 only shows for a shared repo)
└─────────────────────────────────────┘

🗺️ Roadmap

Ideas being considered, not yet built:

• Code Smell Boss, function-length mode — the current boss only counts bloated files (300+ lines); flagging individual bloated functions needs real per-language parsing and is a bigger, separate build.

Have an idea? Use DevGotchi: Send Feedback — that's what it's there for.

⭐ Enjoying DevGotchi?

A rating on the Marketplace is the single biggest thing that helps a free extension like this get discovered. If your developer is still alive, consider leaving one — it takes 20 seconds.

Found a bug or want a feature? Open an issue — I read every one.

Happy Coding. Keep your developer alive, your streak unbroken, and your coffee cup full. ☕