QB64 Pac-Man Clone

[madscijr]

Finally! A working version I can share. This version is as about as close as you can get to the original without using MAME and ROM images.
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Have fun! Waaka Waaka Waaka ...

This is really nice. Thank you. 

I know you have worked hard on this, and it's excellent. Now I'm going to try and push for just a little more. The obvious would be Ms. Pac Man, but I think there is something better - add an editor and a couple of options to be able to MAKE Ms. Pac Man from inside the game, as well as create different mazes, edit the Pac sprites and edibles, play with the rules a little bit, change colors timers and speeds, play simultaneous multiplayer (cooperative or competitive?), maybe even a simple editor and primitive language to program the ghosts' logic or fruit's path through the maze. 

That's asking for a lot. Maybe just a way to edit mazes to start with, would give this game a longevity and add a new level of fun that the original never had. 

But anyway, great job, as always! You did it with Berzerk, you did it with Asteroids. What about Tempest (with level editor!), Gravitar, and Defender / Stargate?? ?

Yes, I agree, a level editor would be cool. However, games that do support level editors are built with that functionality in mind before a line of code is even written. Unfortunately I didn't design the game with an editor in mind. It would take much more than a simple modification I'm afraid. I would need to rewrite the entire maze handling routine to accommodate it. I suppose a generic maze generator and handler could be designed that would allow graphics of all the various pac-man iterations to be plugged into (or evern custom graphics). But then there's the issue with movement too. Pac-man looks simple enough at the surface but underneath pac-man has a very sophisticated movement algorithm. You can literally slide pac-man around corners at 7 different points at intersections. The original programmers of pac-man were quite ingenious with its design as I found out while emulating it.

Wow, I always thought the game had good feel, but I never knew how it was implemented. 

I'm not intimately acquainted with the code like you, but when I think about it, it seems that any maze is just a combination of the same limited set of turns and intersections. There are only so many directions Pac Man can go, so even with 7 different points each, any maze can probably be broken down into the same root "tileset", no?