Vesper

VESPER - THE DESKTOP ASSASSIN

A pixel-art hitwoman who lives on your desktop, follows your cursor, and will pull a gun on it if you push your luck.

Vesper is a desktop pet for Windows. She walks around on top of whatever you're doing, follows your mouse across all your monitors, reacts when you click her, and talks to you in Win95-style speech bubbles. She's a professional: dry, unhurried, flirting like it's a negotiation, and never quite joking about the gun.

No launcher, no installer, no Electron. One small native program and a few MB of RAM.

MOODS, AND HOW YOU EARN THEM

A hidden Affection / Irritation model drives four moods, and each one changes how she moves, what she says, and what she does with her hands:

  On the clock  -  Charmed  -  Trigger-happy  -  Stood up

Keep the cursor near her and move gently and she warms up. Yank it around and the gun comes out and stays pointed at your cursor, from a safe professional distance. Ignore her and she sits down and sulks. Ignore her for a minute and she falls asleep, and she'll swear she wasn't when you click her awake.

Click her for a reaction: a dance, a lean, a gun twirl, or, if she's angry, a warning shot. 

She also comments on what you're doing. She recognises browsers, editors, terminals, chat, media and games in your foreground window and has something to say about each. Every line is hand-written. No AI, no network, no telemetry.

THE WARDROBE

One Vesper, a lot of looks. Four skin tones, and nine pieces you can put on or take off one at a time: dress, red set, white set, stockings, garter, heels, choker, earrings and hair. Or pick a preset: Evening, Lingerie, Undies, Stockings. Whatever you choose is drawn onto all twelve of her poses (idle, walk, dance, sitting, lean back, lying down, sleeping, gun idle, gun walk, aim, aim walk, reload) and remembered next time.

VESPER.EXE: CONTRACTS

Switch her into her window and she's out on a scrolling city street. Click the street to put out a contract: a bin, a bag of rubbish, a dumpster, a street sign. She picks one, walks into range, and goes to work. Muzzle flash, tracer, six rounds, then a reload with the magazine hitting the pavement. Whatever she hits goes flying and drops a coin, and she strolls over to collect her $250.

(She only shoots street furniture. Nobody gets hurt except the bins.)

THE REST

- Three behaviours: Clingy (always follows the cursor), Independent (the default: roams on her own and visits now and then), Performer (ignores you and puts on little shows).

- Sizes 1x to 3x. She's drawn from 128px sprites, so she's big and detailed even at 1x.

- A draggable "Vesper 98" control panel with her portrait, mood meters, wardrobe, pose player and contracts. It lives in the tray when you don't need it.

- Flicker-free: she moves by relocating her window, and only redraws when her picture actually changes.

- High-DPI aware: the panel and the window stay the right size on a 4K monitor.

REQUIREMENTS

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Unzip anywhere and run Vesper.exe. Keep the assets folder next to it. Your settings live in %APPDATA%\Vesper.

CREDITS

Pixel art: GandalfHardcore (128px Female, City Tiles, Emojis and Icons).

Panel UI kit: Retro Windows GUI by comp3interactive.

From the maker of Pelia - The Desktop Succubus.

Suggestive pixel art: lingerie, a red dress and a cartoon handgun. No nudity.