Visual Language

The look of Checker Town, Chess City, and the studio behind them — the palette, the type, and the motifs — kept in one place so everything we build (the site today, the game tomorrow) reads as a single world. Built in the open, this included.

Color

Deep operative purples, one unmistakable gold, and a small set of signal accents.

Operative Gold#F5C518

Bright Gold#ffd740

Void#0a0714

Card#160c33

Panel#2D1B69

Border#6b5fa0

Lavender (text)#c9a7ff

Paper (text)#f0e6ff

Signal Green#6bffb8

Rose#ff8fd0

Arcade Blue#3cbcfc

Terminated Red#ff3b3b

Gold is the one true accent — used sparingly, it means "this matters." The purples carry the mood; the signal colors (green = go / verified, red = retired, blue = arcade, rose = flair) each mean one thing and are never decorative.

Type — The Voice Chart

Six faces, and each one speaks for something. This is the part that drifts if nobody writes it down, so: who talks in what, and where each one is never used.

Princess and the Journey

Poppins Both brands · display & headings · 400/600/700/800
Never body copy — it loses legibility below about 15px.

A dog who can learn anything sets out for Chess City, one square at a time.

Inter Both brands · body copy, and the default for every page · 400/500/600
The one face that never needs a reason. If a block of text has no argument for being anything else, it is Inter.

◈ Operative Uplink · Clearance Delta

Share Tech Mono PJCC · the operative voice — clearances, codenames, clocks, kickers, the news wire · uppercase, wide-tracked
Never a paragraph, and never on a McPuppy Studios page — the studio is not an operative.

PRESS START
HIGH SCORE 0064

Press Start 2P The arcade · cabinet type — Murphy's Law and the card that opens it
One game and its door, on purpose. It is a costume, and a costume worn everywhere is a uniform.

Made slowly, in the open, by one person.

The studio serif McPuppy Studios · asides and captions on the studio side · system stack, italic
Iowan Old Style → Palatino → Book Antiqua → Georgia. No file to download: it borrows whatever good serif the reader already owns.

The Reading Room · 将棋の島

The place serif PJCC · the two rooms in the world that are about reading — the Reading Room and Shogi Island
Georgia → Times New Roman. A second serif because it does a second job: this one is a place speaking, not the studio.

The rule underneath all of it: a face is a voice, not a decoration. Adding a seventh means answering who is talking that none of these six can speak for — and every face here is either already on the reader's machine or a woff2 we host ourselves, so nothing on this site waits on a font server.

Motifs

The gold rule. A 3px #F5C518 line — under the header, atop the footer — frames the whole site like a film title card.
The Gauntlet door. An arched doorway with light under it; it grows grander the higher you climb, and stands ajar once you've beaten all ten floors.
Chess glyphs. The back rank (♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞) drifts faint in the background, and the world's buildings are shaped like the pieces.
The operative dossier. A light spy-file framing — clearances, codenames, "last seen" — worn warm-first, never cold.
The sky keeps town time. Dawn / day / dusk / night, stars, and a shared forecast — the world runs on one Eastern clock, and the moon shows the real phase it is showing outside your window.

Voice

Warm first, spy-flavored second. Honest and encouraging — the games and stories model good values (curiosity, courage, showing up) without preaching. No hype, no false urgency, and no apologizing for being early. Anything not finished says one of three words — Building, Next up, or Retired — and nothing on the site claims to exist until it does.