I’m building a small desktop pet app. A little ape that walks around on your desktop on its own, throws a rope and climbs along the edges of whatever windows you have open. And poop sometimes… 
Everything is 32x32.
Quick credit first: the original idle and walk cycles come from Pixel Jungle Monkey Platformer (Beginner Friendly) by Pixelsym on itch.io, released for commercial and general use. Everything past those two, the reading, climb, stumble and drag animations, is mine.
Attached is the reading animation. He picks up a book when nothing happens for a while, and gets grumpy if you drag him mid page. Adding the rest too since the timing reads better when you see them together.
I come from motion design, so pixel art is the newer half of this for me and I’d like some outside eyes on it. Main thing I keep fighting is readability at this size when the character is holding something. The book kept coming out as a grey blob until I cut it to two tones and let the arm silhouette do the work, but I’m not sure that’s the right solve.
One thing I actually can’t test alone: this thing sits on top of whatever’s on your screen, so the sprite lands on white docs, dark editors, busy wallpapers, all of it. If you’ve done pixel work that has to read against an unpredictable background, I’d like to hear how you handled the outline.
I’m mostly after ideas at this point. He currently idles, runs, climbs windows, reads and reacts to being dragged, poop, and there is basketball game that he can grab the ball and shoot (you shoot with the mouse) and there’s an accessory system on top. I separately animate accessories sprites for states on transparent backgrounds for every state.
If you had one of these living on your desktop, what would you want to catch him doing?