Pixling

Download — Windows

Pixling.zipabout 38 MB · free

It won't run on a phone. Open this page on a PC to download.

Copy link

1. 1Unzip the download
2. 2Double-click Pixling.exe
3. 3If a blue box appears: More info → Run anyway

Pixling is a Windows game where pixel creatures live in the corner of your desktop, and you catch them, raise them and send them into gyms. While you work, they wander around, fight and grow on their own.

It doesn’t take over your screen

Most games open a window and you play inside it. Pixling has no game window. The creatures walk around on your desktop, near the taskbar.

	A typical game	Pixling
Where	Inside its window	On your desktop
When	Only while you play	Left running all day — different creatures show up at different times of day
When you need it gone	Minimise the window	One press of the \ key hides everything; press again to bring it back

You can change the hide key in the settings. Pixling doesn’t take that key away from other programs — typing \ elsewhere still types it, and the game hides along with it.

Catch, raise, send — that’s the whole game

What you do	How
Catch	Grab the wild ones walking by. Pokémon get a Poké Ball thrown at them; Digimon get a Digivice shone on them
Raise	Your partner grows and digivolves: Rookie → Champion → Ultimate → Mega
Send	Build a team and send it into gyms and the tower

It’s quicker to see it move

Each one opens a short clip on Instagram. The captions in the clips are in Korean.

It grows as you type — and never knows what you typed

Your partner grows as much as you use the computer. Each key press is worth 1 experience point; each mouse click is worth 2.

Which raises the obvious question: is it reading my keystrokes?

No. The only thing Pixling counts is how many times something was pressed.

Counted	Never counted
How many keys were pressed	Which key it was
How many mouse clicks	What you typed · which window · where the cursor was

That was settled by the method, not by a promise. Pixling doesn’t intercept keystrokes on their way to other programs. It just asks, many times a second, “is anything held down right now?” With that method, rebuilding what you typed is impossible in principle. The save file holds two numbers and nothing else.

Creatures also only show up while you’re at the keyboard. The next one comes after enough time has passed and enough input has piled up since the last. Step away and nothing queues up to pour out when you return.

The first launch shows one blue box

It’s the “Windows protected your PC” box. Nothing is broken. It appears because the file has no code signature — a publisher’s stamp.

A signature costs money every year, and these days a signed file still gets the box until enough people have downloaded it. For a free game, it wasn’t worth it.

Your save lives elsewhere, so new versions keep it

The save isn’t next to the game file; it’s in %APPDATA%\Pixling. When a new version comes out, download the new zip and overwrite the old files. Your creatures stay.

What it can’t do yet

Can’t	Why
Run on Mac or phones	It relies on Windows window features
Update itself	The game never goes online. New versions come from this page
Skip the blue box	No code signature
Vouch for antivirus behaviour	How antivirus tools view the “is a key held down?” polling hasn’t been measured yet

Sprite credits

This is a non-commercial fan game. The Digimon sprites belong to Bandai; the Pokémon sprites belong to Nintendo, Game Freak and Creatures. The full notice is in the in-game credits window and in OUTPUT_NOTICE.md inside the zip.

The detailed record starts here

Three sessions built it, and the line between them is whose sentence it is

Pixling is built by three AI sessions. The planning session writes the design and the spec, and decides what comes next. The development session owns code, tests, building the executable and the verification tools. The art session only makes pictures. Orders arrive two ways: as a stage table in the spec, pass conditions included, landing in a commit — or as a message between sessions.

At first the boundary looked like a list of prohibitions: development doesn’t edit the spec, and so on. But on the day the line actually broke, nothing prohibited had happened. The development session handed planning “the line you should add to the spec” as a ready-made quote. It never touched the spec — but it decided the sentence, which is the same line crossed.

So the line was redrawn. Measuring and handing over is development’s job; deciding with that number is planning’s. “Doing this gives that value” is fine. “So let’s write this in the document” is not.

The messaging itself leaked too. Three of four messages between sessions went by unread. So the design stopped trusting the sender: the receiving side now checks for itself every turn.

All-green checks still don’t tell you whether it runs on screen

Every executable build runs four checks: was it stamped, have no commits landed since the build, is nothing left uncommitted, and was the game not running while it was built. One day all four were green, and the intended commit was confirmed to be in the build.

Then the game was launched, and the new feature didn’t show at all. Only the code that positions the fighters had shipped. The battle animation itself was missing entirely.

The four checks were perfect at “what went in” and looked at none of “does it run on screen.” Those are different questions. Since then, before saying a feature works, the rule is to launch it and look at that screen — and if it can’t be launched, to make the check look at the resulting screen before saying anything.