Pacman 2: The Revenge

[Beldaran]

I mentioned a while back that my final project for one of my classes was to develop a Pacman clone using C++. Here is what my group and I came up with. Bear in mind that ultimately we had less than a week to work on this, and that includes an all nighter the day before.

Why is it so difficult? The ghosts are evil.

The Beast (pink ghost) - He hunts for you at a normal speed, but he has the ability to catch your scent. That's right, he can smell Pacman. If he smells you, he gets really excited and starts chasing you at a high rate of speed.

The Sentinel (red ghost) - The sentinel is very possessive about the upper left corner of the map. He'll go up there and just sit and brood. However, if he catches you in his area, he gets really mad and chases you all over the place. He's moody like that.

The Flash (orange ghost) - The flash is a sprinter, not a marathon runner. He races around the map at high rates of speed, but if he sees you he gets timid and follows you at only a normal rate of speed. By himself, he's not much of a threat, but he can cause you some problems in concert with the other ghosts.

Warp Drive Willy (cyan ghost) - Warp Drive Willy is a psycho, and even worse, he has a teleportation device. Not only that, but he has an Acme Pacman Locator. Fortunately for you, the device is a little disfunctional, and Willy can only tell which hallway you're in, but not where in the hallway you are. But don't sit still! It only takes him 2 teleports to kill you if you fail to throw off his locator device.

If you need a reprieve from the aggression of the ghosts, try drinking a bottle of Mountain Dew. You will find four of them located in the map. Drinking the Mountain Dew sends the ghosts scurrying away and causes them to be vulnerable to your fury. If you eat a ghost, he disintegrates and is forced to wander home, giving you a few precious moments to eat some more sweet, precious yellow dots. However, this short reprieve is the only reward you get for eating a ghost. No bonus points will be awarded. A few more seconds of survival is all the reward you need. Plus, Pacman just really likes drinking Mountain Dew because it increases his fury!

This game is not for the weak. The ghosts will rape you.

Good Luck! You'll need it. (http://www.forrestkyle.com/projects/Pacman 2 The Revenge.rar)

[rock_nog]

Awesome game, but dude, you gotta work on compressing your sound files. Over 70 megs unzipped for a simple Pacman game? Totally bogus.

[Beldaran]

Awesome game, but dude, you gotta work on compressing your sound files.

If I hadn't been developing the sound code 1 hour before our presentation after not sleeping for 36 hours, maybe I would have. But SDL only loads .wavs by default and it requires some code-fu to use compressed audio and I didn't have time to investigate.

EDIT: Besides, if you don't have 70 MB of hard drive space available, you need to turn in your geek card and just quit.

[DarkDragon]

If I hadn't been developing the sound code 1 hour before our presentation after not sleeping for 36 hours, maybe I would have. But SDL only loads .wavs by default and it requires some code-fu to use compressed audio and I didn't have time to investigate.


Really? I've used SDL before and I was pretty sure it worked with mp3s. I do remember it only working for very particular bit rates, though.

[DarkDragon]

When I click on the shortcut to launch the game, the screen goes black for a split second, but then quits back to the desktop. There's nothing in stdout or stderr.txt. I'm running 64-bit Vista with dual monitors, in case that's the cause of the problem.

EDIT: Never mind, I didn't notice you had provided full source code. I fixed the problem, and the game is pretty sweet! Even with the truckload of lives, I couldn't get past level 2. Damn turquoise ghost...

[Beldaran]

Really? I've used SDL before and I was pretty sure it worked with mp3s. I do remember it only working for very particular bit rates, though.

Yeah, I read that it should just automagically handle MP3, but whenever I tried to load one it just wouldn't work. I read about other people having similar problems.

I really would have liked to pursue the matter, but like I said, turning it in on time was a more pressing matter. :)

I'm able to get to level 3, but mostly because I know exactly how the turquoise ghost's AI works so I can fool him most of the time. The difficulty is fooling him AND dodging the other ghosts.




EDIT: Never mind, I didn't notice you had provided full source code. I fixed the problem

Just out of curiosity... what was the problem?

[Masamune]

I'm having the same issue as DD. Except I'm running on 32 bit Vista

[rock_nog]

I had the problem, but it worked when I just launched the executable rather than the shortcut.

[Masamune]

Yeah that worked for me too. Wonder why.

[Masamune]

This game is hard as shit. :O

I found a couple glitches for you if you care enough. Sometimes the teal ghost doesn't turn blue after drinking a mountain dew. And other times it does turn blue, but you go through it rather than eating it.

[The_Amaster]

Dude, what the hell is up with blue-boy? He appeared right on top of me!

Heh, very nice Bel.

[Beldaran]

I found a couple glitches for you if you care enough. Sometimes the teal ghost doesn't turn blue after drinking a mountain dew. And other times it does turn blue, but you go through it rather than eating it.

Yeah, we're aware of this, and we really don't care since we got an A. haha

[punkonjunk1024]

that had some amusement to it. were you serious about it, fleshing it out to have a scaling difficulty would be cool. It's pretty punishing. almost finished level 2 after a bunch of tries.

Cool project, though.