About Study Critters
A quiet place to study with other people. Pick a street and a critter, and your window lights up in the building. Everyone else who's studying right now is a lamp in a window beside yours. There's no chat and no camera. The point is just not being alone at your desk.
How it works
- A shared timer. Everyone does 25 minutes of focus and a 5 minute break, in step, on every street.
- Breaks at the café. When the break starts, every critter heads downstairs to the café for a cup of something, then back up.
- Decorate your window. Study time unlocks things for your window: a candle, fairy lights, curtains, a window box, a cat on the sill, and more. Everyone on the street can see them.
- Study with friends. Open the street menu (top left) and make a private building, then send the link. Your friends get the windows next to yours.
- Knock. Tap someone's window to knock. Their lamp blinks and they get a little note that someone said hi.
- Goals. Set a goal for the session from the task button. Others see a sticky note on your window, but only you can see what it says. Tick it off and it goes on your share card.
What it stores
Almost nothing, and nothing about you:
- There are no accounts, no cookies, and no analytics or trackers.
- While you're here, the server knows a random ID for your browser, your critter, what you're working on, your window decorations, and whether you've set a goal. It keeps all of that in memory only, and forgets it when you leave.
- Your goal's text never leaves your browser.
- Your study time, streak and settings are saved in your own browser (local storage), so they stay on this device.
How it was made
Plainly: with a lot of help from AI. The street art was generated with an image model (via Higgsfield), then snapped onto a real pixel grid and brought to life in code: the rain, smoke, flickering lamps, windows and critters are all drawn by the program as it runs. The critters themselves are small pixel maps drawn in code. The music was generated with Google's Lyria model. Most of the code was written with Claude. Nothing here is hand-painted, and nobody should think it is.
Questions
Why is my window dark sometimes? On a break your lamp is turned down while you're at the café. It comes back on when focus starts.
My laptop is struggling. Turn on Calm mode in the 🎵 menu. There's less moving and a lower frame rate.
Can I leave it running for hours? Yes. Study time keeps counting with the tab in the background.
Can I use it on stream or in a video? Yes. /london?video (or any street) shows just the scene, with critters coming and going on their own.