If anyone wants to read how Pac-Man works on a very deep level, check out: <a href="http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html" rel="nofollow">http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html</a><p>It's super interesting.
<i>"Along the way, I jumped into the rabbit hole of Pac-Man minutiae and came out impressed with some of the clever firsts the game pulled off.<p>When Halo came out in 2001, it was praised for its dynamic soundtrack, which was more reactive to players’ actions than many previous games. Ahead of its time, Pac-Man had a crude version of a dynamic soundtrack in 1980."</i><p>Close. The <i>Flash</i> pinball machine from Williams Electronics (released January 1979) had a background sound that changed dynamically as game play progressed and is considered the first. Pac-Man came slightly later (May 1980 in Japan, October 1980 in the USA).
That's fascinating. Congratulations to Tyler for not only sharing this story but also sharing this as a project on GitHub. It's quite a bit of code and a nice peek into the world of Lua game programming for me, since I've had very little contact with this language.
I had never really been a fan of PacMan before, but for last month's 1GAM [0] I decided to build a clone. Once I started reading into it, I was pretty fascinated by the amount of depth the game has. As said in the article, pretty amazing for something running on a 3 MHz Z80.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.onegameamonth.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.onegameamonth.com/</a>
For anyone interested in PacMan, The PacMan Dossier is a must-read: <a href="http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html" rel="nofollow">http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html</a>
Namco shut down my Pac-Man project [0] last year on github after it was posted to Hacker News. Good luck :/<p>In short, it works on mobile devices, uses HTML5 Canvas, has ghost visualizations, and Braid-like rewind.<p>Read about it and play it here:<p>[0] <a href="http://pacman.shaunew.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pacman.shaunew.com/</a>
In 1980, four of us - myself and three co-workers, attempted to write a pac-man like game. I really haven't had much interest in game programming, but one guy did and wrote a basic display with keyboard moves. The ghosts were in the form of each of our initials, and the plan was each of us would program our own ghost strategy algorithms. It never got too far along. I should also mention that this was written in Pascal for the Texas Instruments 990 (not the POS 99/4a home computer) business computer on 80x24 monocolor text-only screens. Hey, but it was multitasking and multiuser - each of us could be playing our own copy of the game. My Windows 7 PC still gives regular demonstrations of its non-multitasking DOS heritage. In 1982 I bought an Apple II Plus thinking I might develop some games... coming from a mainframe and minicomputer environment, I was more than a little disappointed. I didn't return to PC programming or even own a PC until 1988 when I found out SCO Xenix would run on a 286... for weeks at a time, with multiple users, without crashing. Gaming has come a long way, but some OS fundamentals still haven't, at least not in the PC world.
This almost reminds me of the time that i wrote a fully customizable pacman game back in '09 , The AI was not state of the art (because i was new to Computer science). But the Level were completely custom , you just had to edit a text file in which you set the collision color [1], and provide two new images ( one for food locations and the other for the map) and you had a new level.<p>The code was a mess [2] ( i didn't even know about OOP back then )but i keep it for historical purposes ( like it was the first game i ever wrote).<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/fahadm/Historical/blob/master/PACMAN/Settings.ini" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fahadm/Historical/blob/master/PACMAN/Sett...</a><p>[2]
<a href="https://github.com/fahadm/Historical/blob/master/PACMAN/page%20flipping.cpp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fahadm/Historical/blob/master/PACMAN/page...</a>
If one of his intentions was to inspire tinkering, then it worked. I tweaked the game to include an extra 6 ghosts and speed up pacman. More fun, but still hard. Had to randomize their leave box time to make them not appear as one.
LÖVE has a Web player (using WebGL and Lua.js) in the works, would be cool to see if Pac-Pac runs on it: <a href="https://github.com/ghoulsblade/love-webplayer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ghoulsblade/love-webplayer</a>
Also interesting and related to pacman: patterns to get a rather easy victory <a href="http://www.math.montana.edu/~hyde/pacman/" rel="nofollow">http://www.math.montana.edu/~hyde/pacman/</a> and also the hidden spot in pacman <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFGoiQAzG-I" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFGoiQAzG-I</a>
This was an actual challenge at a hack-a-thon I was at way way back (I'm guessing around '92). The total instructions were pretty much "(best game category) build a pac man variant", the restriction to pac man only mostly there to render quite a bit of the prior-to-the-event design less useful when it was announced. It was over 48h though. There were some pretty creative entries. I built one with more ghosts (increasing per level) with generated mazes, but from a predetermined per-level seed so that level 1 was always level 1, but there were still infinite(ish) levels (I was in a kind of Elite phase again after Elite II). Didn't even end up entering, I'd had a HD crash a few days before so I didn't even have my normal go-to bag-o-tricks in terms of stuff to render, time, do controls, etc and did it from scratch. By deadline it worked "almost some" but not enough to really be playable.
Games like these are relatively easy to make with modern game engines like Löve. There are many original indie games in early development worth checking out:<p><a href="http://love2d.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=5" rel="nofollow">http://love2d.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=5</a>