toastsim/README.md

TOASTSIM

Bread goes in. You are judged.

A browser game about making toast, where the inputs are analog and the output is scored by a man who has been doing this for thirty-one years.

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:5173

The loop

Order → toast → drawer → spread → verdict → next day.

1. The ticket tells you what someone wants: how dark, which spread, how much, which utensil, and whether they'll tolerate burnt bits.
2. The toaster has a dial and a lever and no timer. You go by smell.
3. The drawer makes you find the right piece of cutlery in a tangle of similar ones — while your toast goes cold.
4. The bench is where the game actually lives. See below.
5. The judge scores nine criteria and has something to say about the worst one.

The mechanic

One control — the knife's angle (mouse wheel) — and three behaviours fall out of it:

angle	contact	what happens
flat	wide, low pressure	spreads — or tears the bread, if the spread is stiffer than the pressure you're allowed to make
steep	narrow, high pressure	scrapes spread back off, or lifts char off burnt toast
steep + fast, on bread with nothing left to take		gouges

The trap: pressure comes from steepness, but past the scrape threshold a steep knife stops spreading. So a spread can demand more pressure than spreading mode can physically give:

situation	yield	angle needed	scrape cliff at 0.62
fridge butter / cold toast	0.72	0.75	impossible
bench butter / cold toast	0.54	0.57	one click from disaster
fridge butter / fresh toast	0.36	0.38	fine
soft butter / fresh toast	0.16	0.12	dream mode

Cold toast with hard butter cannot be spread at any angle. The way out isn't technique — it's not dawdling in the drawer. That's why the drawer is there. The pressure gauge draws both marks so you can watch the gold sit past the red and understand exactly why you're losing.

Scraping is the other tension: it rescues burnt toast and wrecks evenness doing it (char 99.9% → 54.5%, evenness 0.029 → 0.226). The judge notices both.

And MITEY is its own skill: spread it on, then take almost all of it back off. He wants to see the toast through it.

The bread

Same dial, same 18 seconds, four breads:

bread	4s	9s	18s	char
white	0.22	0.54	1.08	93%
multigrain	0.20	0.52	1.06	92%
raisin	0.30	0.76	1.14	99.8%
sourdough	0.11	0.33	0.74	14%

Sourdough's water has to boil off before the crust can brown, so it stalls and then accelerates hardest. Raisin bread is sugar: it browns early and burns early.

How it's built

• Vite + TypeScript + three.js, Rapier for the drawer. No framework; the UI is a DOM overlay over one WebGL canvas.
• The slice is the whole game's canvas: an extruded loaf silhouette with four 128×128 scalar fields — browning, dryness, spread, damage — packed into one RGBA8 texture per frame and composited by a custom shader. Everything the player does writes a field; everything the judge reads is a statistic over one.
• Cutlery is procedural on purpose. The drawer asks you to tell a dessert fork from a dinner fork, and that's only fair if the silhouettes are authored.
• Physics: compound boxes, never trimeshes. Grabbing is a capped PD spring, so a snagged piece fights what's lying on it instead of tunnelling through.

Layout

src/
  core/     app + loop, input, seeded rng, 2D field, synthesised audio
  sim/      bread, slice (geometry/fields/shader), toasting, spreads,
            spreading (the star mechanic), cutlery
  scenes/   kitchen (toast + spread), drawer (rapier), judge, props
  game/     game loop, orders, judging rubric, the judge's lines
  ui/       hud, title, cutlery silhouettes
  dev.ts    dev-only harness — drives real gestures deterministically

Dev harness

The game is driven by mouse gestures over a 3D scene, which makes "does it work" hard to answer by inspection. In a dev build, window.__t drives the real code paths at a chosen dt:

__t.toast(10, 6)      // lever down, 10s at power 6, pop, land
__t.spread(9, 0.55)   // dip and raster the slice at 0.55 units/sec
__t.stats()           // every field statistic the judge will read

It's also the escape hatch for headless browsers that never fire rAF — everything calls app.step(dt) directly.

Assets

Every asset was generated on-device and free via MODELBEAST, and is reproducible:

./scripts/gen-assets.sh        # fixed seeds; skips anything already present

flux_local → bg_remove_local → hunyuan3d_mlx. The judge's five expressions are one fixed seed and one fixed description with only the expression phrase varying, which is why he stays the same man while his face falls.

The toaster is procedural rather than the generated GLB — it needs a lever we can actually drive, and a dial that turns.