Design System

SECTOR (handheld)

The brand at 8-bit. Time-limited run.

SECTOR is a time-limited marketing deliverable, not a core product. It celebrates the legacy of an industry leader in the mobile entertainment space and ports the FDT visual vocabulary onto legacy 8-bit handheld hardware as a brand collaboration. Expect this page (and the SECTOR ROM) to sunset when the campaign closes.

The target is 8-bit handheld - 160×144 resolution, 5-bit color channels, palettes of 4 colors each. The full FDT color system cannot reproduce on this target. What survives is the relationships between colors, not their exact hex values.

Approach

Snap each FDT semantic color to its nearest representable value on the target, preserve the contrast relationships, and anchor every palette with a shared navy-darkest so the brand mood carries through regardless of which sprite or tile you’re looking at.

Snapped palette

FDT token	Handheld-snapped	Role
`navy-900`	`#081020`	Universal dark anchor - color 0 in every palette
`navy-600`	`#203050`	Mid-dark structural elements
`steel-400`	`#586880`	Mid-tone, inactive elements
`fog-100`	`#E8E8F8`	Light, highlights
`electric-500`	`#1870F8`	Friendly units, active UI
`hostile`	`#E03028`	Enemy units, contested territory
`neutral`	`#30A858`	Secured territory, success
`caution`	`#F0B830`	Warning, low resources

Rules

Color 0 is always #081020 across all BG and sprite palettes. The shared dark anchor preserves brand mood across every tile and sprite - even when the other three slots carry a semantic hue.
No glow. The target has no alpha blending. Active states use a 1-pixel white (fog-100) outline or color inversion - never dithered halos. Dither reads as noise at 160×144.
Two grays maximum per palette. The navy-800 / navy-700 / navy-600 / steel-500 spread is imperceptible on the target. Pick a dark anchor and one mid-tone, drop the rest.
No hues outside the FDT semantic set. Distinguish unit classes through silhouette, animation, and position - not palette expansion. No pinks, no purples, no oranges beyond caution.
Classification and status mapping hold. Contested territory is hostile red, secured is neutral green, unknown is steel gray, in-test / low-resource is caution amber. The same vocabulary SECTOR inherits from GRIDWATCH.

Reference point: Z by Bitmap Brothers (1996). Strong silhouettes, clear team-color distinction, minimal per-unit palette depth. SECTOR’s visual language descends from Z - the FDT semantic colors are what appears on territorial flags and unit markers.