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Toaster Chef

Toaster Chef is a simulation platform and 2D web game that serves as an incubator for two real-world initiatives:

  1. Kitchen Garage — a Charleston, WV nonprofit community kitchen (early / aspirational)
  2. siMPowerUp — a parameterized simulation of the MPowerUP peer mutual-aid network

The game layer — electric trikes, pastries, a Studio Ghibli-style neighborhood — is the accessible visualization surface. The primary deliverable is the headless analytical simulation: scenario-driven, agent-calibrated, and exportable as SimulationOutcome JSON that informs real design decisions for MPowerUP and a potential real Kitchen Garage.

The simulation is unified, not two parallel systems: NPCs in the game world are siMPowerUp participants, a Kitchen Garage is a Circle facilitator, and serving food to an NPC is responding to a help request.

Why simulate first

MPowerUP's core theories — token economy, mutual-aid incentives, SSI benefit interactions, bad-actor facilitator dynamics — cannot be validated with documentation alone. Simulation is the earliest possible test of whether those theories survive contact with realistic conditions, before real users are in the system. Success for Toaster Chef is measured in:

  • Scenario outcomes that narrow the [HYPOTHESIS] → [SIMULATION OUTPUT] gap for MPowerUP theories
  • Research deliverables citeable in grant applications
  • Design decisions for MPowerUP or Kitchen Garage that would have been wrong without simulation evidence

This is not a for-profit game. It is an incubator.

Status

Active development (Big Nerd Idea, LLC). The formal model (Layer 0) is complete; the core simulation tick (Layer 1) is next. The repo is private during active development; an open-source release is planned at the first simulation v1.0. A real-world Toaster Chef Trike (GoSun-inspired solar cooking) is in planning only — [HYPOTHESIS], no vehicle purchased.

Validation discipline

Toaster Chef adds a project-specific marker, [SIMULATION OUTPUT], sitting between [HYPOTHESIS] and [PILOT VALIDATED] on the Epistemic Honesty validation spectrum. Outputs from simulation runs narrow uncertainty but do not replace field validation and are never promoted to [PILOT VALIDATED] without real-user data.

Sections

  • Summary — this page
  • Operations — Kitchen Garage, the Charleston pilot, and the simulation model
  • Technologies — architecture and the agent/ecosystem model
  • Software — the Phaser / Colyseus / shared-types stack
  • Hardware — the real-world solar Trike concept ([HYPOTHESIS])