Candybrat

Candybrat is a school cafeteria that behaves like an organism with moods. It scans you at the tray line, serves the emotional cuisine it thinks you need, distorts the record at the surveillance booth, archives what you throw away, and replays it back at you later. Food is assigned, not chosen. Time loops on gossip spikes and resets after crying in public. The door marked EXIT is a lie — the handle hums your ex’s playlist.

Underneath the sugar it is a clinical framework. Each zone maps to a self-tracking category and targets a different neurological pathway; the playful framing is what gets past the trauma response that usually blocks making anything. The rules are somatic exercises wearing a costume.

Twelve canon characters. They are not allegories — each one is an emotionally embodied function that operates inside the ecosystem, a glitch-stable contradiction with a job.

Eight rooms, each one a tray compartment and a full emotional architecture with its own rules, inhabitants and landmark. Twelve zones sit inside and between them as microportals — the Tray Line, Table 2C, Vending Machine Row, the Melt Zone, the Emotional Disposal Bin, the Exit Door That Isn’t Real, Yogi’s Dripline, the Fridge That Feeds Back, the Surveillance Confection Booth, the Bathroom Portal, the Lost Tray Closet, and the chewed-gum archive under Table 2C.

Glitterlunch — the cafeteria as a handheld

Glitterlunch is the cafeteria built as a real device. It runs on an M5Stack Cardputer, a pocket computer with a 240×135 screen and a physical keyboard, and it carries the same world: the same six weather states, the same familiars, the same rooms. Where the rest of this page is the world written down, Glitterlunch is the world you can hold.

Four layers. The firmware is 3,276 lines of C++ across main.cpp, areas.h, characters.h, weather.h and ui.cpp, running on the device. The backend is 1,793 lines of Node.js calling Claude Sonnet 4 for generation, with a Qdrant vector store holding conversation history so the device remembers what you told it across reboots. The browser simulator is 1,289 lines of vanilla JS drawing to an HTML5 canvas at 3× scale, hitting the same backend, so the whole thing can be developed without reflashing hardware every time. The memory layer records every interaction, every weather change and every character routing decision.

The boot sequence is 25 JPG frames at 40ms, then a starfield, then “reaching for signal…”, then a greeting screen coloured by whichever weather state the device wakes up in.

Eight familiars answer, and which one you get depends on the current weather, your recent interactions, and the area you are standing in: syrupina, gloopette, marinara, glitchina, baby_jpeg, motherbrat, princess_squelch, frozenyogurt.

Six states move across every room. They are nervous-system conditions, not moods, and the player never sees the label — you feel it in how the room behaves and how hard the claw is to move. They run cold to molten, and the same six run FIELD and Glitterlunch.

There is no reset. Every grab stacks and the cafeteria digests what you feed it, so the world degrades as you use it — by the end you have made the mess and the mess is the record.

The passes before the cast settled — framing tests, proportion, how far the material could go before the face stopped reading.

Mine end to end: the premise, the twelve characters and their dossiers, the eight rooms, the twelve zones, the six weather states, the four corruption stages, the lexicon, the visual language and the clinical framework underneath it. Built out as a claw machine on the web, a handheld familiar on an ESP32 Cardputer, an image-generation prompt system, and the Glitterlunch API that runs all three off the same state model.

The document is alive rather than finished — canon allows mutation, new brats, new zones. Nothing exits clean; everything discarded feeds back into the texture.