Pac Man For The Win is Ready

Pac Man for the win is ready and hopefully bug-free. Hope you enjoy playing it!

URL: http://www.flashbynight.com/pacmanftw

PacMan ftw

Since PacMan is thirty years old this year, I thought I might just do a homage and give pacman the old flashbynight treatment. By which I mean I take the game and mess around with the mechanics and the gameplay until I reckon I’ve come up with something different.

I’m calling my game, Pac Man For The Win because I used to really suck at the stand-up arcade version and I wanted to make something more casual. My idea is to come up with totally different mazes for each level and also to have different numbers of ghosts and powerpills and so on.

The first step was to build the ‘engine’ – basically a class which would recognize when pacman encounters blocks, dots, powerpills and ghosts. I could reuse some of this code to control the ghosts. After that, I was free to concentrate on level design, which is where I am now. I’ve designed 12 out of twenty levels and you can play the first three here:

www.flashbynight.com/pacmanftw

I’ll update the page and eventually the finished game will appear there, sometime around the latter part of June.

Another thing I did was to look closely at the AI of the ghosts in the original game. I always thought that they pressured pacman too much and made it a difficult game. However, the original designer claimed that he made the AI such that the ghosts would not chase pacman 100% of the time. I got this from a great article on ‘Ghost Psychology’ here: www.webpacman.com/ghosts.html


My ghosts have three modes:

1 random => they move randomly about the maze
2 pursuit => they actively home in on pacman
3 scatter => they flee from pacman

For most of the game, the ghosts are in random mode. Every so often, one or more will go into pursuit mode for a short time. If the player completes all 20 levels, he can replay them with all ghosts constantly in pursuit mode. (Without this feature, I couldn’t have a high score feature, because everyone who finished the game would have a similar score).

When pacman eats a powerpill, all ghosts go into scatter mode, but only for a few seconds (or else they end up bunched against the walls).

So as you can see, I had a lot of fun creating PacMan For The Win and I hope everyone has a fun time playing it.

Don’t forget to try my other reworked retro games:

Retris

Nanopedes

Spack Invaders

New Tute: Creating a Document Class

There's a new tute available: Creating a Document Class:

www.flashbynight.com/tutes/doc_class/

A document class in AS3 allows you to keep all your code in an external .as file instead of the main .fla movie.

This tutorial is suitable for beginners to AS3 - you'll need to know how to create a document class before you can go on to do anything else, really.

A Quiz Template

A visitor to my site recently commented on my tutorial for building a multiple choice quiz in AS3 and asked for help with a simple fill-in-the-blanks quiz.

I put together a template and I thought I would share it here. (Right-click and select save-as.)

I will probably put this into a short tutorial available on flashbynight. Until then, just contact me if you need any help with it.

I also have a drag-and-drop tutorial here.

The Inside Job

Just finished another game, called the Inside Job and it's playable at www.flashbynight.com/insidejob

It's an orb-popping game that I'm sure will grow on you if you give it a chance.

I can't link it to my main page yet since I'm away from home, but the link will go up next week.

Angels of Bayonetta

I'm playing Bayonetta on the 360 at the moment.

What grabbed me from the beginning was how cool and well designed the angel enemies are. Unfortunately, in the game you can't get a good look at them because they come at you really fast. I didn't even realise they had faces and I thought the pointy bits were beaks! They're actually beards.

Anyway, here they are in all their glory (click on the picture for a full view):

Game Prototype: Fall On Me

Here is the prototype of a game I'm working on: Fall On Me.

The premise is basically that it is a platform game where the platforms fall into place as you go along. They are generated randomly.

Keep in mind that it is far from finished. So far, the basic game mechanic is done, but the game basically needs more 'stuff'.

Give it a try at: www.flashbynight.com/fallonme