Desktop companion · Released
A calm study buddy that lives in the bottom right corner of your desktop, half companion and half productivity tool. It shares the screen with whatever you are actually working on, so the entire design problem is presence: being felt without being intrusive.
- Solo developer and designer
- Solo
- Aquila Games · 2025
- Released on Steam
01The problem
Before Muse Corner became a pixel-art desktop buddy, it was closer to a game: a full 3D environment where you could pull out a chair, sit down at a computer, and pin notes to a corkboard. It looked impressive as a prototype, but Muse Corner's actual job is to sit beside someone's real work without competing with it for attention, and a full 3D room competes.
02Research & rationale
There was no formal study here: the test was living with the prototype while trying to actually study next to it. A 3D room with furniture to walk around and interact with read as a place to play, not a presence to have nearby. That mismatch, between what looked technically impressive and what a study companion actually needs to do, is what decided the direction change.
03Iterations
Concept A: a 3D desktop room
A full 3D environment: a chair you could pull out, a desk you could sit at, a corkboard for sticky notes. The more technically ambitious build, and the one that got scrapped. It asked for engagement the way a game does, when the actual job was to stay quietly present while someone else worked. The project restarted from zero after this.
Concept B: a pixel-art companion
A small pixel-art buddy in the corner of the screen, built from scratch. Smaller, cuter, and designed around one idea: presence should reward a glance, not demand one. Every system that came after, the grid placement, the study economy, the task structure, was built to protect that one decision.
04Screens
05Walkthrough
06Result
What shipped kept only the instinct that mattered from the first attempt: be there without asking for attention. The grid placement system, the economy tuned to feel earned rather than farmed, and the template-method task structure all exist to serve that same decision, not to add back the complexity the first version was cut for.
- Unity
- C#
- Systems design
- Economy design
07Limitations
- The direction change came from my own experience of studying next to the prototype, not from observing anyone else use it.
08What I would do differently
Muse Corner is where 'present without interrupting' first became a design problem for me. Interruptions have a measurable cost even when work gets done faster (Mark et al., 2008), which makes it a question I could now study rather than feel: does a companion in the corner change how long people stay on task?
09References
- Weiser, M., & Brown, J. S. (1996). Designing calm technology. PowerGrid Journal, 1(1).
- Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008. ACM. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357072