A free, open-source nutrition game co-designed by Dan and Adam (age 9).
▶ Play it now: daridor9.github.io/critter-cafe · 📖 Read the story behind the game
You are the family nutritionist. Your family of four — a baby, a child, an adult, and an elder — each has different needs. You shop on a weekly grocery budget, plan meals, manage spoilage, and learn what real food does for real bodies. The game teaches by putting you in charge, not by lecturing.
It is built around three real-world tradeoffs every family makes:
- Time — fresh cooking takes longer than packaged food
- Cost — pantry staples are cheap; convenience is expensive
- Nutrition — the right food at the right time for the right person
Pick any two; the third pays the price. Learning to balance them is the game.
- No body shaming, ever. Consequences are energy, mood, and growth — never appearance.
- Player as expert. You are not a student being taught; you are the family's trusted nutritionist.
- Cultural inclusivity. Players pick a kitchen tradition (Mediterranean, East Asian, Latin American, South Asian, Northern European) with its own pantry, recipes, and seasonal calendar — because every culture solved nutrition, all are valid.
- Real food, real data. Ingredient nutrition uses real values (USDA FoodData Central).
v1 — playable end-to-end (June 2026). Plan a full day of meals — breakfast, packed school lunches, lunch at home, a snack, and dinner — with combination plates, real calorie/macro tracking per life stage, and an honest end-of-day energy report. Three switchable kitchens (Mediterranean, East Asian, Latin American), an editable family of up to 8 (multiple kids each get their own lunchbox), adjustable budgets, multi-day play, a first-run tutorial, and automatic saving in the browser.
Critter Forge is the same team's biophysics creature-design game. A future tournament mode will connect the two: design a critter, then feed it across a multi-terrain journey.
Vite + React + TypeScript. Deployed via GitHub Pages.
npm install # install dependencies
npm run dev # local dev server with hot reload
npm run build # production build
npm run deploy # deploy to GitHub Pages (build + push to gh-pages branch)MIT — free to play, free to fork, free to teach with.