Pixel Aquarium Widget

Project Description

Pixel Aquarium is an open source desktop widget that renders a living pixel art aquarium directly on the user's desktop, running entirely in a lightweight Electron shell with no cloud dependency or external services. The application features a procedurally animated ecosystem including three species of pixel art fish with individual blink cycles and swimming behavior, a pixel castle, coral formations, rocks, seaweed, and a continuous bubble system, all rendered on an HTML5 canvas using vanilla JavaScript with no runtime dependencies. A full day/night cycle shifts the sky, water color, sun, moon, and stars across an eight-minute loop, giving the widget a persistent ambient presence on the desktop. Built with a transparent, frameless Electron window configured to sit below all active application windows. Distributed as a cross-platform desktop application, the build pipeline leverages GitHub Actions to automatically compile and publish Mac and Linux installers on every release, while the Windows installer is packaged locally using electron-builder with NSIS targeting.