PACWORDS — YES, YOU CAN ACTUALLY PLAY
A WordPress-themed Pac-Man clone you can play right now in your browser. Built to prove that web design does not have to be boring.
WHY YOU JUST FOUND A GAME ON A PERSONAL SITE
Honest answer: because web design does not have to be boring.
A personal website is the one place online where you do not need to optimize for conversion rate, lead capture, or quarterly KPIs. It can be a portfolio. It can be a billboard. It can be a Pac-Man clone with WordPress-themed pellets.
PacWords is the latter. A fully playable arcade game, built into a personal website, demonstrating what custom web development can do when nobody is telling you to remove the fun for engagement metrics.
WHAT YOUR NEXT BUILD COULD UNLOCK
Most websites are built from theme marketplaces. The output is a site that looks like every other site that bought the same theme. Custom web design is the alternative — original interaction patterns, generative visuals, audio reactivity, performance budgets that hold.
This game is roughly 700 lines of TypeScript across six files. No framework, no game engine. The whole bundle is under 30KB gzipped. The point is not that it is hard. The point is that any custom development team can ship something like this if the brief allows for it. Most briefs do not.
TECHNICAL BRIEF — IF YOU ARE STILL CURIOUS
- HTML5 Canvas — no game engine, no framework
- TypeScript classes for player + ghosts + game loop
- Delta-time movement (frame-rate independent — runs the same on a 5-year-old phone and a 240Hz monitor)
- Web Audio API for chiptune sound — defaults to muted, no autoplay
- Keyboard, touch swipe, and virtual D-pad for input
- Pause-when-tab-hidden via Page Visibility API
- High score persisted to
localStorage - Astro island — only hydrates on this route, zero JS shipped to other pages