HOT
POTATO
GAMES
Play games. Have fun. $HPG.
Section 01 · answered 2026-08-03 · awaiting lock
Brand Overview
Games hot enough to change your life. Fun first, sweat second, a baked potato in your hand.
You got picked last. You doom-scrolled instead of living. You arrived and felt empty. Hot Potato Games is the way back — and the way back is play. Every game is fun first (if it's not fun, it's no good), hot on purpose, and quietly rigged to get you off the couch and into a body you'd take swimming without a second thought. Explore The Cell is live. Sod Tori is next. Tater Dash is already on your phone. Did you eat your potato today?
- Mission
- Lasting life change, through play. Fun first — never only fun.
- Vision
- The annual Hot Potato Games tournament — a digital side and a physical side, mentally engaging and physically engaging.
- Audiences
- Gamers who were picked last — the escapist, the relentless, the arrived-but-empty — and the communities they build on the way back.
Personality
- Hot
- It's in the name. Intense by default — HIIT, sprints, the burn. Casual play exists as the on-ramp, but the brand runs hot.
- Crispy
- Thin, addictive energy. Every game should feel like opening a bag you can't put down.
- Complete
- GAMES is a rubric, not a vibe. A partial game is zero.
- Competitive
- Leaderboards everywhere, there when you want the fight — but the deeper game is you vs you. Yesterday's self is the real rival.
- Honest
- A session is a real human playing. Self-play doesn't count and never will.
- Warm-blooded
- The body and the brand move together — health first, code second.
- Purposeful
- Purpose is revered here. The game is the onramp; the change is the point.
Construction principles
- Fun is the bar. If it's not fun, it's no good — being more than fun never excuses being less fun.
- GAMES, asked twice. Ship the five artifacts — Game · Agent · Manual · Education · Session — then ask each its quality question: Good? Aggressive? Marketable? Entertaining? Simple?
- Sessions measure; they don't justify. Real, non-Brett plays are this season's number — in service of the tournament, never for their own sake.
- Chips is everywhere-at-once. Any chip carries the authority of all Chips; the collectible ties every property together.
- Chunky and lit. Thick borders, hard shadows, torch-warm color — the gameworld look, never flat corporate.
- A game without a session can't compound. Close cleanly, re-enter cleanly.
- Addictive, with off-ramps. Games pull you in — and then push you out. Cooldowns and calls-to-action hand you to the workout, the progress roundup, the next person you bring in.
The GAMES quality questions
| Artifact | Question | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Game | Is it good? | Fun is the bar. A shipped game that isn't good is zero. |
| Agent | Is it aggressive? | CPUs are aggressive but not strategic — they apply pressure, and the game rewards the strategic thinker. Usually. |
| Manual | Is it marketable? | Reading the manual should make you excited to play — an invitation into the IP, never homework. |
| Education | Is it entertaining? | Where learning is integrated, it entertains — or the education gets re-evaluated. |
| Session | Is it simple? | Simple primitives. A session built from simple pieces closes cleanly and re-enters cleanly. |
The community stance
This is a community for body transformation without the poles: no toxic-empathy body positivity, and no reverence for the extremes that harm the body — sub-7% body fat is not the goal; for the men here, sub-20% is a great place to live. The image of arrival is simple: take your shirt off and go swimming, without shame — health for yourself, so you can be a better father, brother, son, friend, and community member. The full profiles behind this — James, Ike, Horace — live in the ideal-customer work.
The games are the conduit; connection is the product. The ladder runs weekly and monthly meetups → seasonal qualifying tournaments → the annual tournament, with ranked play online and real-life events in exercise-forward places. Members submit progress pics and workout film; roundups show the community to itself — before and after, in one collage.
The ritual
One staple of the program: eat a baked potato — no butter, no salt. Not because it's the best food, but because it's satiating, pleasant, and shared. “Did you eat your potato today?” is how people in the know greet each other.
The approach is satiation science, not restriction. Nobody here is anti-fries, anti-tots, or anti-chips — roasted, baked, and mashed are the staples because they keep you full. Potatoes everywhere, addiction nowhere.
Section 02 · proposed
Logo System
The coin is the mark: a flame-headed potato, flexing, on an olive field ringed in gold.
Clear space & minimum size
Keep a margin of one ring-width (the gold band of the coin) clear on all sides. Below 32 px on screen the letters close up — use nothing smaller. The coin is already its own avatar: it ships as the social crop unchanged.
one-color and reversed logo variants — no files exist yet
horizontal wordmark lockup (coin + “HOT POTATO GAMES”) — not yet drawn
Do
- Use the coin at full color, on cream, olive, or orange
- Keep the ring's gold — it is Golden Shade, a brand color
- Use the coin alone as avatar and favicon
- Pair the coin with the Bungee wordmark, coin left
Don't
- Stretch, tilt, or crop the coin
- Recolor the potato or the flame
- Set the coin on busy game art without a solid plate
- Add glows, bevels, or drop shadows beyond the system's hard offset
Section 03 · proposed
Color
The Potatuhs tri-orange, dropped into a torch-lit gameworld of olive and brown.
Primary — inherited from Potatuhs
Divisional — the HPG gameworld
Fiery Orange ramp
Hovers and backgrounds come from the ramp — never eyeballed. The 700 step is the text-safe orange on light surfaces.
Gradients
brand · 135° · orange → sienna → gold. Hero moments only, never behind body text.
Pairing & contrast — measured, recorded honestly
| Pairing | Ratio | WCAG AA |
|---|---|---|
| Ink on Cream | 15.2 : 1 | PASS — all text |
| White on Field Olive | 14.7 : 1 | PASS — all text |
| Golden Shade on Field Olive | 8.8 : 1 | PASS — all text |
| Fiery Orange on Ink | 5.0 : 1 | PASS — all text |
| Fiery Orange on White | 3.5 : 1 | large text / UI only |
| White on Fiery Orange | 3.5 : 1 | large text / UI only |
Rule: body copy is always Ink-on-Cream or light-on-dark. The oranges carry headings, buttons, and score moments — the gold-on-olive pairing (the coin's own pairing) is the signature.
Section 04 · proposed
Typography
Bungee for the fixed and the loud. Outfit for everything that changes.
PLAY
hero · Bungee · clamp(3rem → 6rem)
Choose your game
h1 · Bungee · clamp(2rem → 3rem)
High score: 909
h2 / plaques & scores · Bungee
Session complete — re-enter cleanly
h3 · Outfit 800
Body text is Outfit. Every dynamic value — player names, scores that change, weekly themes — sets in Outfit at weight 700–800, never in the display face.
body · Outfit 400 · clamp(1rem → 1.125rem)
Caption · leaderboard timestamps, footnotes
caption · Outfit · 0.8rem
rBvge1i5…$HPG · token addresses, IDs, code
mono · JetBrains Mono
The two exceptions
Hot Potato Games
Bowlby One SC — one sanctioned use: the homepage brand-mark title (approved 2026-07-09).
Sod Tori
Alfa Slab One — the per-game accent roster. A game may own an accent face; it never leaves that game's surfaces.
Do
- Bungee for fixed titles, plaques, values, scores
- Outfit 700–800 for dynamic content that needs weight
- Fluid clamp() sizes at every display level
Don't
- Set user-entered or changing text in Bungee
- Use Bowlby One SC anywhere but the brand-mark title
- Fake bold, outline text, or stack three display faces on one screen
Section 05 · proposed
Iconography
Lucide, stroke 2, on a 24px grid — the shared Potatuhs library, with an HPG subset.
The umbrella declares Lucide as the ecosystem's icon library; each division declares its own subset in its own guidelines. The HPG subset below is that declaration — the Games set moved here from the umbrella document (gamepad-2, trophy, dice-5, swords, users, timer, crown) plus the members this vertical added itself: training and the token.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Library | Lucide |
| Grid | 24 × 24 |
| Stroke | 2px, round caps |
| Sizes | 16 · 20 · 24 · 32 |
| Color | Inherit text color; Fiery Orange for the active state only |
gamepad-2
trophy
dice-5
swords
timer
dumbbell
flame
users
crown
coins
Declared here. The Games set (gamepad-2 · trophy · dice-5 · swords · users · timer · crown) moved in from the Potatuhs umbrella guidelines; dumbbell, flame, and coins are HPG's own additions.
In context — the icons at work
An icon only earns its place on a real screen. Here the set runs a live game HUD in both aspect ratios HPG ships to — 16:9 for web and console, 9:16 for the phone.
Section 06 · answered 2026-08-03 · awaiting lock
Photography & Illustration
Eclectic worlds, drawn. Real people, playing — we love victory.
- Eclectic
- One style does not rule. Pixel halls, painted fields, paper grain — the catalog is allowed to wander; eclectic IS the system.
- Torch-lit
- Warm light against deep olive-brown dark. The palette's oranges are the light source, not a paint color.
- Textured
- Pixel grain, burlap weave, soil and stone. Surfaces read as material, never flat vector gloss.
- Characterful
- Every scene can hold a potato with an attitude. Environments are stages, not wallpaper.
- Game-ready
- Art ships tileable, idle-animatable, and legible at gameplay scale — per the HPG Environment Style Guide v1.0.
Formats: game key art (16:10 tiles on the catalog) · in-game environments · character sprites. The Environment Style Guide in potatuhs-design is the north star for linework, texturing, and asset-generation prompts.
Photography — people, playing
Photography is in the system, and its subject never varies: people playing. A game at the table, a silly face mid-calisthenics — either counts, because both are play. The camera leans into the smile and the power-up face. We love victory: arms up, teeth out, the moment the score lands or the last rep finishes.
no photography assets exist yet — first collection pending (meetups, calisthenics, victory moments)
Do
- People mid-play — games, calisthenics, sprints
- Smiles, power-up faces, victory arms
- Silly and real over polished and posed
- The moment after — the win, the last rep, the high five
Don't
- Sterile stock or gym-glamour posing
- Equipment-only shots — no people, no play
- Joyless grind imagery; suffering as aesthetic
- Body-spectacle framing — the face and the play lead, not the physique
Section 07 · answered 2026-08-03 · awaiting lock
Mascots & Characters
Odie leads. Russ runs the company. Potatohr is where Sod Tori is going. The rest of the cast fills in over time.
- Odie — the Main Character
- The flagship potato and the face of the games. Tater Dash's lead fighter ("Tater"); the same Odie as Potato Literature, post-time-skip. When HPG needs a hero, it's Odie.
- Russ — the CEO
- The russet. Potatuhs' CEO and in-universe avatar — inquisitive, idea-driven, "Uhhh…" before the real take lands. He presides over the studio; every game is made under his roof.
- Potatohr — the future of Sod Tori
- The star of where Sod Tori is heading — the face of the tactical pillar's next era, carried in as the game grows into its full types, seasons, and weather engine.
- The logo potato
- The flame-headed flexer on the coin. It appears on the mark and in hype moments — not a playable character, and it never speaks.
- The wider cast
- Chips heads the studio; the Originals — Burt, Eido, Buddy — round out the Tater Dash roster beside Odie; Gobie, Yogi, and Javi join later in canon. Mascots arrive in time.
The Originals in play — the Tater Dash fighters
Odie · "Tater"
The hardest. Spaces, charges Focus to MAX, hoards the bank — then all out.
Buddy · "Butter"
Jumps more, weaves slip stuns, prefers the rising uppercut.
Burt · "Burlap"
The easiest. Hit-and-runs — one swing every three seconds, then backs off.
Eido · "Blight"
Runs combo strings and clinch-hunts. Throws from the lock.
Guard bubbles render in fighter colors — a UI convention, not an identity: a fighter is not a color (Brett, 2026-08-03). Characters are characters; the palette just helps you read the fight.
Section 08 · proposed
UI Components
Chunky borders, hard shadows, a press you can feel. The arcade cabinet, in CSS.
Buttons
Primary: Morning Sienna fill, 3px ink border, 4px hard shadow. Hover lifts to Golden Shade and grows the shadow; press collapses it flat — the button physically depresses. Focus is a 3px Fiery Orange outline, always visible.
Badge & input
Game tile
Sod Tori
Tactical grid · one-hit KOs
The catalog's unit. Hover tilts half a degree and lifts — playful, never floaty. Title in Bungee, tagline in Outfit.
In situ — the same tokens as a product screen
Section 09 · proposed
Shadows & Borders
Opaque ink, hard offsets, zero blur — the chunky, stamped depth of a game cartridge, not the soft glow of an app.
Hot Potato Games is arcade-physical. Every card, button, and tile is a solid object you could pick up — a 3px ink outline like a sprite, a hard offset shadow like a coin pressed into felt. The rule is absolute: shadows are opaque ink, never blurred, never translucent. Blur is for apps that want to disappear; we want you to feel the piece move. Press it and the shadow collapses — a real button clicking down under your thumb.
Named tokens
| Token | Value | Job |
|---|---|---|
| --border | 3px solid Ink | every card, button, tile, input |
| --sh-card | 4px 4px 0 Ink | resting elevation — cards, buttons |
| --sh-pop | 7px 7px 0 Ink | hover lift, the device frame |
| none | shadow collapsed | the press — the element sits flat |
Radius scale
| Token | Value | Job |
|---|---|---|
| --r-sm | 6px | nav links, diagram bars |
| --r-md | 10px | buttons, inputs, icon cells |
| --r-lg | 16px | cards, tiles, callouts |
| --r-xl | 24px | device screens, hero plates |
| --r-pill | 999px | badges, status pills |
The three shadow states are the whole elevation ladder: flat (pressed) → card (rest) → pop (hover). Nothing floats higher, and the frontend's soft blurred card-modern contradicts this language — its fate is open item 8 in the lock queue.
Elevation — the three states
Radii — one border, five corners
Do
- Border first — no shadow without the 3px ink border under it
- Collapse the shadow on press; the element physically lands
- Keep offsets down-right, always in Ink
Don't
- Blur, feather, or lower the opacity of a shadow
- Tint shadows with the palette — Ink only
- Invent a fourth elevation between card and pop
Section 10 · proposed
Motion
Rubber hose, in CSS. Everything that moves squashes, stretches, and lands with a bounce.
Motion is juice — the game-feel that makes a tap feel like it hit something. We borrow the twelve principles: anticipation before a launch, squash-and-stretch on impact, follow-through on the settle, a pop on success. Everything overshoots a hair and rebounds, like a coin flipped and caught. Five named easings and a keyframe roster carry it — straight out of 1930s rubber-hose animation, nothing invented.
Easing curves
| Name | Curve | Job |
|---|---|---|
| bounce | 0.68, −0.55, 0.265, 1.55 | interactive elements, hover lifts |
| squash | 0.34, 1.56, 0.64, 1 | squash & stretch deformation |
| elastic | 0.68, −0.6, 0.32, 1.6 | elastic rebound, big entrances |
| smooth | 0.4, 0, 0.2, 1 | color and background shifts — the calm default |
| out-back | 0.34, 1.4, 0.64, 1 | exits with a back-swing |
Durations
| Token | Value | Use |
|---|---|---|
| fast | 150ms | hover, micro feedback |
| normal | 300ms | standard transitions |
| slow | 500ms | entrances |
| slower | 800ms | emphasis, attention |
Rules: animate only transform and opacity. Idle loops belong to mascots and hype moments, never body content. One attention animation per view. List reveals stagger at 100ms. prefers-reduced-motion is respected — transforms and loops stop, opacity fades remain.
Live — hover and press them
Stagger — 100ms per row
Pattern roster (extracted): bounce-in · slide-up-bounce · squash-stretch · wobble · breathe · float · snap · wiggle · pulse-glow. Entrances use slow/500ms; idle loops run 3s; attention runs slower/800ms.
Section 11 · proposed
Layout
An 8px spine, three container widths, and room for the games to breathe.
Containers
Section rhythm
Vertical padding is clamp(4rem, 8vw, 7rem) per section. Surfaces alternate cream → warm cream → gameworld dark to pace a page the way the catalog paces a session: browse, focus, showcase.
Spacing scale — 8px base
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Grid: 12 columns at wide, gutter --sp-4. Game tiles flow in an auto-fill grid because the catalog genuinely varies — editorial pages resolve their counts deliberately.
Section 12 · proposed
Voice & Tone
The umbrella voice governs. HPG speaks inside it — hot, brief, and potato-forward.
External copy is governed by the umbrella voice: Butter, the CMO, is the outward voice of every Potatuhs property — smooth, BRIEF, never winking at the camera. Support and encouragement land in one line. And one hard fence: Russ's “uhhh...” belongs to Russ alone — it is his catchphrase, never a company-wide tic, and it never appears in HPG copy.
Within that governance, HPG has its own vocabulary — the words below are already canon in this book (section 01), not inventions of this section.
The HPG vocabulary
- “Did you eat your potato today?”
- The in-group greeting — how people in the know say hello. Rooted in the ritual: a baked potato, no butter, no salt.
- “Fun is the bar”
- The first principle, quotable as-is. If it's not fun, it's no good.
- “Play games. Have fun. $HPG.”
- The tagline — currently under review (open item 11: does the $HPG-forward line survive the mission correction?). Use until the lock says otherwise.
Words always in
- play — the verb of the brand
- session — a real human, playing
- potato — the ritual, the greeting, the folk
- tournament — where everything points
Words never
- Toxic-positivity language — no empty “you got this!” filler
- Winking at the camera — the copy never nudges you in the ribs
- “Gamify” — the games are games, not a mechanic bolted on
sample · marketing · proposed, to be approved
Explore The Cell is live. Play a session tonight — and eat your potato.
sample · in-game off-ramp · proposed, to be approved
Session complete. Score's on the board. Go get your workout.
sample · error message · proposed, to be approved
That didn't save. Your run is safe — try again.
Tone by context
| Context | Temperature | How it reads |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing | Butter-brief | One line, no wink, an invitation to play. Every extra word gets cut. |
| In-game | Hot and honest | Short, second person, intense — and the off-ramp is built into the copy: the win hands you to the workout, the roundup, the next person you bring in. |
| Error message | Calm, no blame | Say what happened, what's safe, what to do next. Potato-warm, never cute — an error is not a hype moment. |
Tone table and sample copy are proposed drafts, to be approved at lock. The vocabulary above is extracted from section 01 canon and the umbrella voice spec.
Section 13 · proposed
AI Policy
Manned AI directives — a person at the helm, AI in harness.
AI-assisted. Human-directed. Sessions are always real.
| Surface | Rule |
|---|---|
| Story | Sacred. AI never creates or tells the story. Composition only — it may fill in blanks or sections at human direction, and never injects its own side stories |
| Game code & tooling | AI welcome, directed live, human-reviewed before ship |
| Game art | AI generation allowed inside the Environment Style Guide; a human approves every shipped asset |
| Session & leaderboard data | Never synthesized. A session is a real human playing. Bot loops and self-play are tagged and excluded |
| Player feedback | Only what players actually said — no generated or vanity entries |
| Player data | Never enters third-party AI tools |
Disclosure is the default. Hot Potato Games is built in the open with Claude Code, and says so. What AI never touches is the scoreboard: the honest-sessions gate is the brand's most important promise, and it is enforced in data, not just in copy.
Section 14 · proposed
Sub-brands & Ecosystem
Hot Potato Games is a sub-brand of Potatuhs — the game studio. Its ecosystem isn’t a deck of suits; it’s the games themselves.
HPG is the Potatuhs game studio — the summer rip. It inherits the umbrella's hard core and nothing more: the Potatuhs tri-orange (Fiery Orange · Morning Sienna · Golden Shade) and the type-pairing rules of section 04. The darks, the fire, the play — those are ours.
- Explore The Cell
- The flagship. A living catalog of micro-games that walks the universe — physics → chemistry → biology. Playable now on iOS and web.
- Sod Tori
- The tactical, chess-like pillar. One-hit KOs, Earth-potato fighters, elements and seasons. The complex second gravity well.
- Tater Dash
- The endless runner — the Originals in play. iOS live; the cycle's leaderboard game.
Game list parsed live from hotpotatogames.com/play — the site is the source of truth, not this book.
The Cell Catalog
Explore The Cell isn't one game — it's a progression. Each tile is a bite-sized game; clear a domain to unlock the next.
| Domain | Games |
|---|---|
| Physics | Big Bang · Tzimtzum · The Wait · Quantum Foam · Corners · Collider · Accelerator · Standard Model · Decay Chain |
| Chemistry | Atom Builder · Isotopes · Electron Shells · Half-Life · Energy Levels · Molecule Mixer · Bond Lab · pH Balance · Phase Change |
| Biology | Hungry Cell · Organelle Match · Membrane Gate · Powerhouse · Mitosis Rush · Cell Type · Osmosis · Transcribe · Layer Builder |
The shared hard core travels unchanged into every game: the tri-orange and the type-pairing rules. A game may own its surface language — its darks, textures, accent face — but never the tri-orange, never the pairing rules, and never the honest-sessions promise.
Section 15 · proposed
Asset Naming & Governance
One name pattern, one SSOT, one direction of flow: spec → app.
Asset naming — the umbrella pattern
{brand}-{category}-{label}-{season}.{type}
Inherited from the umbrella convention, e.g. spudpos-icon-loadedbakedpotato-1.png. Applied to HPG:
| Asset | Name |
|---|---|
| The coin mark | hpg-logo-coin-1.png |
| Explore The Cell key art | hpg-keyart-explorethecell-1.png |
| Sod Tori key art | hpg-keyart-sodtori-1.png |
The HPG-applied names are proposed — the files currently shipped in assets/ (e.g. sod-tori-1.png, hpg-logo-circle.png) predate the convention; renaming is queued for the lock.
Formats
| Asset class | Format |
|---|---|
| Marks & logos | SVG preferred; PNG fallback |
| Game key art | PNG, 16:10 |
| Character sprites & in-game art | PNG |
no SVG master of the coin mark exists — only PNG. Vector redraw pending.
The governance chain
| Layer | Artifact | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| Spec (SSOT) | DESIGN.md | The canonical spec. When the site and the spec disagree, the site is wrong. |
| Tokens | tokens.css · tokens.json | Generated from the spec; the two files stay in sync, always. |
| Renderer | index.html | This site renders the spec — it declares nothing of its own. |
| Consumer | hpg/hotpotatogames/frontend | _variables.scss mirrors the tokens. Propagation runs spec → app, never backwards. |
| Registry | brands.potatocore.com | The home of every Potatuhs brand book, this one included. |
A value discovered in the app that isn't in the spec is not a fallback — it's a reconciliation item, surfaced loudly and queued for the lock. Open items 8 and 9 (the soft card, the olive primary button) are live examples of exactly this flow working.
Where this spec is silent, the umbrella governs. potatuhs-design/DESIGN.md is the parent authority for anything not declared in this book.