CH 02 Operating Principles / Player-First Engineering
Slide 03 / 12
How the cabinet thinks

Four rules the maze keeps

Readable at six feet
Every interactive glyph stays legible from across the arcade floor — 14px minimum body, saturated hues on pure-black field, no two-tone weakness.
Color carries meaning, not decoration
Yellow is the player, cobalt is the world, the four ghost hues are state — red / pink / cyan / orange never leak into chrome.
Motion snaps, never tweens
Default easing is steps(4, end); transitions feel like sprite frames, hover responds in 120ms, never longer.
Sharp corners earn their place
Buttons and tags ship at 0px radius — pixel-precise edges are how the cabinet says it means business; only cards soften, and only to 4px.
This is the Pac-Man (Namco 1980) design system, applied by Curio Design — a design-style library for AI agents. Full Pac-Man (Namco 1980) guide → designbycurio.com/learn/pacman-namco-1980