Melancholy Otters and Cozy Ghosts Are Live

Every Tuesday I ship something. This week is two things, both small: a pair of iMessage sticker packs called Melancholy Otters and Cozy Ghosts. Both are out on the App Store today for $1.99 each.

I built both of them with StickerForge, the AI sticker maker I shipped last week. Part of the point of StickerForge was to make it possible to go from “I want a sticker pack about X” to a finished, shippable iMessage pack in an afternoon. These two packs are the proof.

Melancholy Otters

Twenty-four otters with feelings. Specifically: tired, slightly damp, in a coat that is too big, drinking from a small mug, and so on. The pack is for the moments where you want to send something that says “yeah, today” without typing it.

A small brown otter sitting and hugging its knees

An otter in a knit beanie holding a small mug

Melancholy Otters on the App Store. See the Melancholy Otters app page for more.

Cozy Ghosts

Twenty-four ghosts who would rather be reading. Sweaters, plaid armchairs, jigsaw puzzles, ghostly coffee. The whole pack is one little ghost in different cozy moments. None of them are scary. The vibe is “rainy Sunday in October.”

A small ghost reading a book of ghost stories in a plaid armchair

A ghost in a knit sweater kneading bread dough

A ghost putting together a jigsaw puzzle

A ghost in a sweater holding a mug labeled Ghostly Coffee

Cozy Ghosts on the App Store. See the Cozy Ghosts app page for more.

Why two packs at once

I wanted to test how fast the StickerForge pipeline actually was now that the tool is live. The answer turned out to be: fast enough to ship two packs in the time it used to take to ship one.

The flow looks like this. Pick a theme. Generate a few sets of four variations until the character feels right. Lock the character. Generate situational variations (sweater, mug, coat, blanket, etc.) until you have 24 you like. Drop them into an Xcode sticker pack project. Submit. The whole loop is a few hours per pack, not a few weeks.

That changes what is worth building. Themed sticker packs used to be a real project. Now they are closer to short blog posts in scope, which means I can make them about specific feelings or specific aesthetics rather than trying to make every pack maximally broad.

How to use them

Both packs are standalone iMessage apps. Install from the App Store, then in Messages tap the apps icon and pick the pack from the sticker drawer. Tap to send, drag to layer onto another message, or peel-and-stick to a photo.

iOS 17 or later. Works on iPhone and iPad.

What’s next

More packs. The two themes I am sitting on right now are “tiny chefs” and “lazy frogs.” If you want a specific theme, tell me and I will probably make it.

If you want to make your own pack instead of waiting, StickerForge is the tool. It is the same thing I used for these two.