A reading tracker with a pixel-art pet. Every page you read is mana; your familiar eats it, hatches, grows and learns. Free, no ads, no account.
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You are a reading mage, and every mage needs a familiar. Yours lives on mana, and mana comes from pages. Read and it hatches from an egg, grows through five stages and changes with what you read. Forget about books and it slowly turns to stone, from the paws up, until a few pages break the spell.
All the art is pixel art painted by the app itself (shaded shapes, hue-shifted ramps, dither, rim light), so every familiar shows what you read:
| Familiar | Loves | Grows | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦 | Mimic | finishing a book | from a little chest to a chest of books with a crown jewel |
| 🦊 | Kitsune | a new genre after the last one | a tail in each finished genre's colour, up to nine |
| 🟢 | Slime | things from books | swallows one thing you name after a chapter (a sword, a letter…), and you see it inside |
| 🐉 | Dragon | long books | sits on a hoard of the books you finished |
| 🔥 | Phoenix | coming back after a pause | never turns to stone: burns to ash and rises again |
| 🦅 | Griffin | reading streaks | its wings spread wider every stage |
| 🦉 | Owlbear | non-fiction and history | spectacles, then a scholar's mantle |
| 🦋 | Moon moth | reading after ten at night | a star on its wings for every night of reading |
| 🦝 | Tanuki | audiobooks | big headphones and a leaf on its head, golden when ancient |
| 🌱 | Sprout | reading before ten in the morning | a flower on its leaves for every morning of reading |
| 👻 | Ghost | horror and mysteries | a lantern, a wisp for every horror or mystery read, a top hat when ancient |
| 🐛 | Bookworm | long sittings, 45 minutes and more | a new segment in a finished book's colour at every stage, and spectacles |
| 🦁 | Chimera | books in your own genres and subgenres | a patch on its coat for every genre of your own, goat horns, then wings |
| 🐦 | Magpie | staying in the genre of the book before | a shiny thing in its nest for every subgenre, and a longer tail |
Three can hatch at the start; the other eleven are found by reading (a 400-page book, five late nights, seven days in a row, a non-fiction or history book, a comeback after a pause, five audiobooks, five mornings, a horror or mystery, three long sittings, books in three genres of your own, two subgenres of one genre).
Forms. A grown familiar takes one of five forms for good, after the books it was fed on, with its own colours and crown: astral (fantasy, sci-fi), shadow (mystery, horror), bloom (romance, poetry), sage (classic, history, non-fiction) or wild (adventure and the rest). The bestiary shows which way it leans.
Character. Every egg hatches with a nature of its own: a sleepy one goes to bed early, a glutton chews longer, a curious one brings back more finds, a grumpy one wants a longer stroke, a playful one hops twice, a brave one isn't scared of horror.
About one egg in sixteen hatches shining, in a rare colouring: a moonlit kitsune, an ice phoenix, a snowy owlbear.
Your familiar lives in a little pixel room. Every mana it ever ate leaves a spark, and sparks buy furniture: a window with the real day or night in it, stained glass, a bookshelf filled with the colours of your finished books, a bubbling cauldron, a mandrake that peeks out of its pot, a telescope, fairy lights, rugs, candles, a lantern. Spending sparks never takes anything from growth.
Stroke the familiar sideways and it squeezes its eyes shut and purrs. After midnight it sleeps and snores, and a tap wakes it for a sleepy moment.
| Feature | How it works | |
|---|---|---|
| 🕯️ | The ritual | A candle that burns down while you read, a big "turn the page" button with a rustle, or just read and say where you stopped at the end. A synthesised fireplace or rain. Lay the phone face down and the familiar dozes on your lap; quiet time feeds a bonus. |
| 🎧 | Read or listen | Switch any book between reading and its audio version, sitting by sitting: a gramophone turns instead of the candle and the minutes count by themselves; the page in the text is optional. Audio-only books are counted in minutes. |
| ✍️ | Log reading | Read on the train? Log the page you reached, or just the minutes you read or listened. |
| 🍖 | The feast | After each sitting: pages, candlelight, stillness, the familiar's favourite, a finished book. Too many pages in too little time and it sniffs at them suspiciously. |
| 🎭 | Moods | After horror it trembles, after romance it blushes, after a mystery it squints, after non-fiction it puts on spectacles. |
| 🧺 | Finds and the casket | Now and then the familiar brings back a little thing from the story: a bookmark, a dragon scale, a magnifying glass, a love letter. Each genre has its own; 25 to collect. |
| 💭 | Dreams | Read in the evening and in the morning a bubble shows what it dreamt, after last night's book. Dreams fill an album. |
| 🎲 | The draw | Can't choose? The familiar draws a book from Want to read, with a little prophecy. |
| ✨ | Only N more | The nearest little goal: a full familiar today, the next stage, the end of the book, a new piece for the den. |
| 🕯️ | Guardian candles | Bought with sparks; one burns by itself on a day you didn't read, so the streak lives on. |
| 🎃 | Seasons | Samhain, the winter holidays, Valentine's days, World Book Day and midsummer dress up the den and the familiar, with a find you can only get then. |
| 🤝 | Visits | Show a QR code to a friend (or send it as a picture): your familiar stays in their den for a day, recommends a book and leaves a gift. Phone to phone, no server. |
| 💌 | Postcard | A picture of the familiar in its den with your book and streak, to share. |
| 🔎 | Find a book | Search Fantlab (Russian books and translations) and Open Library (Google Books as a fallback) by title or author: the title, author, pages and the real cover fill in. Covers are kept on the phone. Or pick your own picture from the gallery, or get a cover drawn in the genre's colour. The length is optional. |
| 📚 | Shelves and cycles | Make your own shelves and put books on several. Give books a cycle and a volume number; the volumes gather together, and reading the whole cycle earns a reward. |
| 🏷️ | Your own genres | Add subgenres to any genre (Fantasy · Dark fantasy) or genres of your own (Manga). They colour the cover and sort the shelf; the built-in genre still sets the mood and the magic. |
| 🔍 | Search, filter, sort | Search the whole library by title, author, cycle or genre; filter by genre, subgenre, paper or audio and stars; sort by recent, title, author, rating, progress or length; covers or a list. |
| 🌳 | Tree of stories | Every finished book grows a glowing fruit in its genre's colour. Tap one to open the book. |
| 🎯 | Goal for the year | How many books this year, with how far ahead of or behind the pace you are. |
| ⚔️ | The guild | Three monthly errands, the same for every reader, none of them a must. |
| 📖 | Saga | Your year told as a legend, with a square for every day of reading, ready to share. |
| 🔔 | Reminder and widget | An evening line from your familiar, quiet on days you've read; a home-screen widget with the familiar and today's pages. |
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Get Familiar.apk from the latest release and open it on your phone (allow installing from your browser or file manager when asked). Android 8.0 or newer.
Some phones (Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung) stop apps in the background: allow autostart and lift battery limits for Familiar so the evening reminder arrives.
No account, no ads, no analytics. The app goes online only when you search for a book and to download its cover; your reading stays on the phone unless you export a backup. Visits travel phone to phone as a QR code; the camera is used only while you scan a friend's code.
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest # unit tests
./gradlew assembleDebug # app.familiar.dev, installs next to a release
./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.familiar.demo with ten weeks of made-up reading, for screenshots
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender --tests '*RenderArt*' # sprite sheets to app/build/art, launcher iconsThe sprites live in app/src/main/java/app/familiar/ui/pix: Pix.kt is the shading toolkit, Sprites.kt, Newcomers.kt and Patchwork.kt hold the fourteen familiars and their eggs, Wardrobe.kt their forms and seasonal hats, Room.kt the den and its furniture, Scenes.kt the candle, the gramophone and the tree.
MIT. Part of Stillcraft.