Suki, the guided tour

experiment · this very website

01 — Why a cat

The site pretends to be a design file, and design files are disorienting for guests — infinite canvas, no obvious map. The honest fixes (a nav bar, a sitemap page) would puncture the fiction. A guide character keeps it: someone who lives inside the file and knows where everything is. And if the guide is going to have a personality anyway, it may as well be the personality that sits on my keyboard while I work.

The reference model, photographed mid-shift. Every sprite below was drawn from poses like this one.

02 — The sprite sheet

03 — The brain

She runs on a single function evaluated every animation frame. It checks, in priority order: is a ride in progress (ease the page scroll along a cubic curve and move her with it) — is the palette open (search or confused, depending on results) — is a timed mood active (celebrating and confused expire on a timer) — is she delivering a tip — otherwise, sitting or sleeping depending on whether you woke her. Whichever state wins picks the sprite, the flip direction, and whether the zzz shows.

The “where to?” box matches your words against 13 destinations, each with its own keyword list and its own arrival line — ask for “skiing” and she walks you to my Killington instructor pass and says “psia level 2. he will tell you about it either way.” On phones, where there is no cursor to follow, she trades the walk for 9 tip pins pinned to the things she would have told you about.

04 — Details nobody asked for