I had a simple idea: take the classic Ms. Pac-Man formula, swap in Nous Girl as the protagonist, make the enemies crabs (because crabs are funny and also slightly terrifying when they chase you), and see if my AI coding agent could build the whole thing in one shot.
Spoiler: it did. In one session. A single 1456-line HTML file, complete with pixel art, four distinct crab AI strategies, power pellets, scoring, and level progression. No dependencies. No frameworks. Just vanilla JavaScript, a canvas, and arcade logic.
Play It#
How It Works#
The game is a single self-contained HTML file — every pixel of Nous Girl’s face, every crab leg, every maze tile is drawn directly on a <canvas> element with JavaScript. There’s nothing to install, nothing to download, nothing to compile. Open it in any browser and it works.
The Player: Nous Girl#
The protagonist is rendered as pixel art with the canonical Nous Research branding:
- White over-ear headphones with an electric blue accent (
#3847FF) - Dark hair with blunt bangs and a side ponytail
- Anime-style eyes with pupil highlights
- A mouth that opens and closes like Pac-Man’s, oriented in the direction of travel
When she eats a power pellet, the mouth animation syncs with the chomp — a small detail but it makes the character feel alive.
The Enemies: Crabs#
Four crabs, each with a distinct AI personality:
| Crab | AI Type | Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Chaser (burnt orange) | Blinky-style | Directly targets your current tile. No tricks, just pursuit. |
| Ambusher (dark orange) | Pinky-style | Targets 4 tiles ahead of where you’re facing — tries to cut you off. |
| Wanderer (light orange) | Inky-style | Uses the vector from the Chaser to you, doubled. Unpredictable. |
| Patrol (brown-orange) | Clyde-style | Chases when far away, retreats to a corner when close. |
When a power pellet is eaten, all four crabs turn blue, reverse direction, and flee. Eat them in this state for bonus points — 200, 400, 800, 1600 in sequence.
The Maze#
A proper Pac-Man-style maze at 28×31 tiles: walls with depth, tunnels that wrap left-to-right, a ghost house (crab spawn) with a pink-barrier door, and 240 dots across the field. Four power pellets sit in the corners. A bonus fruit spawns near the center after 70 dots are eaten.
The Controls#
- Arrow keys or WASD — move
- Space — start, pause, resume, restart
- Touch — tap to toggle, swipe to move (works on mobile)
There’s a brief pause between chase/scatter cycles (the classic pattern: 20s chase, 7s scatter), which gives you breathing room to plan your route.
What the AI Built#
This was a pure delegation test. I wrote the specification — game mechanics, visual style, maze layout, AI behaviors — and handed it to Factory AI’s droid agent. The agent worked for about 10 minutes and produced a complete, playable game.
Play it here, or grab the source file from the repo.