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Pac-Man, but you're the ghost
- Teknomadix 4mo agoCool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.
- omoikane 4mo agoI find that you have to decide which direction to turn before the turn. Once I got that figured out, it was mostly a race to catch pacman along the long straight path at the bottom edge with the ghost's superior speed.
- serious_angel 4mo agoThe code was written by Claude, unfortunately, and hence no controls were probably even considered, or no tokens were left. I jumped in with the love in mind, too, but when I checked the source repository, and saw the actual source... and then the contributors... it was... I am sorry... it hit hard...
- keyle 4mo agoWhere did you quote this from?
- VectorLock 4mo agoYeah its AI slop without the corner easing. But maybe they can AI it better.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- fphhotchips 4mo ago> Horrible controls. Interesting! I found them mostly ok, but I was playing with a keyboard. They definitely remind me of the controls of Pacman games I grew up with where (as sibling comment notes), you have to decide where you're going before you get there. I wonder if tweaking the input buffering or adding some frames after the turn where you 'snap-back' would help, similar to ghost jumps in Mario.
- vunderba 4mo agoI grew up playing Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man in dimly lit arcade parlors and bowling alleys. The controls in this version are, for lack of a better word, sluggish compared to the tight responsiveness of the originals on a four-way joystick or using a keyboard with MAME. Even when you press an arrow key to "move" the ghost, there’s a noticeable delay, almost like it’s polling for the key-up event instead of the key-down.
- nfw2 4mo agoFor me there seems to be latency registering the key press which results in frequently missing turns
- staindk 4mo agoSwipe controls on mobile worked well for me.
- asadm 4mo agopretty nice. I had a multiplayer demo a decade back where one player would be pacman and rest would be ghosts. and it would swap as you cycle. Whoever collects most coins won.
- vunderba 4mo agoI think at one point Namco had a multiplayer Pacman Party Game which had a similar premise - whoever manages to eat Pacman gets to be him in the next round. EDIT: Found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ofrzeta 4mo agoYour link is cut off or something. EDIT: the dot at the end is being cut off by the forum software it seems
- vunderba 4mo agoThanks - link updated, went ahead and just percent-encoded the damn thing. For reference - it's a Gamecube game where the other players play as ghosts released all the way back in 2003.
- tommypham 4mo agohaha just played so cool. I'm thinking of making online multiplayer game for this haha
- VectorLock 4mo agoCool AI slop but the lack of corner easing like the original game makes it less fun.
- ares623 4mo agoTaste and care? In my slop? How dare you sir.
- epcoa 4mo agoAre you talking about for the AI Pac-Man or the ghosts? Because the ghosts in real Pac-Man don’t have cornering.
- VectorLock 4mo agoPac man in Pac-man has cornering.
- pmontra 4mo agoSometimes I manage to make the ghost move on mobile but I don't understand how to do it in a consistent way. Maybe there should be a tap area of 90 degrees above the ghost (from -45 to +45) to move it upwards, 90 to the right to move it rightwards, etc.
- arcastroe 4mo agoOn mobile, you just swipe in the direction you want to move (e.g. swipe up to go up). You can also queue the move ahead of time. So even if you are nowhere near the intersection yet, you can swipe up and trust that the ghost will automatically turn once it reaches the intersection.
- arcanemachiner 4mo agoJust like the original Pac-Man game :)
- akoboldfrying 4mo agoCould be my shitty phone, but the swipe lag is huge. I can swipe ~1s ahead of time and still miss a turn.
- tonmoy 4mo agoI don’t think you can take a turn until you hit a wall?
- akoboldfrying 4mo agoI don't think so -- I managed to turn while on long straights, but nearly always after the turn I wanted to make.
- csande17 4mo agoI think what's actually happening is that the game only counts your swipe as an input once you lift your finger off the touch screen. You can kind of get away with that if you're implementing, like, 2048 (although the official version at play2048.co doesn't do this), but it feels way too unresponsive to be usable in an action game.
- 3-cheese-sundae 4mo ago"Think about it. It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story." https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comic https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...
- dfordp 4mo agokind of like the movie pixels :)
- lowlevel 4mo agoI had this idea a very long time ago.. well before AI... so it was fun to see. Thanks... too easy tho.
- deadbabe 4mo agoWhy are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage? 1. Claude couldn’t do a proper fence algorithm for the walls? 2. Controls feel horrible. 3. It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man? You do not move fast enough and the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes for the human player to take advantage of. 4. The tile based movement is not smooth, very stuttery. Fine for a prototype, but we could do so much better. This is not a particular hard game to code up in an afternoon or even an hour if you’re experienced.
- Reubend 4mo ago> It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man? I caught him! So it's definitely possible. You move a little bit faster than he does so you need to anticipate where he's going.
- NicuCalcea 4mo agoYou don't even need to anticipate, you can just push him towards the bottom and follow, he just goes in a loop so eventually you'll catch up. I caught him first try without thinking of any strategy. The controls are horrid though.
- csomar 4mo ago> 3. It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man? You do not move fast enough and the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes for the human player to take advantage of. It's not impossible. I just did. You just have to corner the man into an impossible situation. But I agree on the AI-slop or lack of quality production.
- blharr 4mo agoJust down vote and move on. You're helping them generate better slop by providing input like this
- latexr 4mo agoYou can’t downvote submissions, only comments.
- purple-leafy 4mo agoshould call it Nam-Cap
- ataru 4mo agoPacman can escape more easily now that there's only one ghost.
- foo12bar 4mo agoFor 400+ lines of html, not bad, even if it is AI generated: https://github.com/garritfra/pac-hunt/blob/main/index.html https://github.com/garritfra/pac-hunt/blob/main/index.html
- exolab 4mo agoAI generated? The humanity!
- InvisibleUp 4mo agoSeems the solution is to immediately leave and follow Pac-Man to the bottom-right (by alternating right-down) and chase him across the long corridor on the bottom. Keep following him and you'll just catch him, since he never goes for the power pellets.
- sixothree 4mo agoThe ghosts are unable to reverse direction in Pac-Man. You should have your agent read this: https://pacman.holenet.info/ https://pacman.holenet.info/
- sparky_z 4mo agoWhat does it mean for the ghosts to be "unable" to reverse direction? Isn't that just another way of saying that the original ghost AI was programmed to never choose to do so? There are, in fact, a lot of things they never choose to do. The whole appeal of this idea is to see if you can make better decisions than the original ghost AI.
- xnx 4mo agoShould ghosts be able to go through walls?
- sixothree 4mo agoGhosts can only change direction at intersections. Otherwise it's just not Pac-Man. It's one of the many many other maze games from this time period. Pac-Man means something just as much as "vintage maze game" means something.
- neonmagenta 4mo agoThe original ghosts had specifically written patterns: Blinky chases pac man where he is. Pinky targets 4 spaces in front of you. Inky targets based on Blinky and Pac's positions. Clyde sticks to a corner until you get too close. They only reverse on their own when the mode changes or you get a power pellet, otherwise they have to wait until a corner, otherwise you end up with behavior like you see in this where you both quickly dance back and forth on the otherside of a wall
- haunter 4mo agoThe less dots there are the easier to "freeze" the game https://files.catbox.moe/g03iwa.gif https://files.catbox.moe/g03iwa.gif
- Chazprime 4mo agoI’m struggling to even leave the ghost pen on iOS.
- akoboldfrying 4mo agoWhat about: Pac-Man, but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.
- flux3125 4mo agoThis reminds me of Coconut Simulator
- x______________ 4mo ago>but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness. Replace ghosts with posts and you have dictated a normal HN user's life..
- beezlewax 4mo agoIf you go left or right as the first move on mobile you can't get out of the box. Pretty frustrating.
- gus_massa 4mo agoIt's not imposible, but I agree that it's very hard.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- kristopolous 4mo agothe ghost is slightly faster which makes the game winnable. thanks for that. I noticed
- geon 4mo agoYou should add inky and pinky so you can corner pacman. Their movement is dependent on blinky, so you would be in control of all 3. https://pacman.fandom.com/wiki/Maze_Ghost_AI_Behaviors https://pacman.fandom.com/wiki/Maze_Ghost_AI_Behaviors
- oniony 4mo agoI'm making a version where you're a pellet.
- decimalenough 4mo ago"If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-1PnNSF350 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-1PnNSF350
- butlike 4mo agoIt's a Sim City like god game where you have to build up life on the pellet as much as possible until some startlingly-fast pac-man eats it.
- paolomon 4mo agocool idea, good start!
- jader201 4mo agoThis reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1] It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV. Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-person 3D perspective, rather than top-down. The ghost that caught Pac-Man would get to take over as Pac-Man (which would inevitably result in a tangled mess of cords by the end). It was a great couch 3v1 game. The WiiU had similar mini-games in Nintendo Land [2], with one player operating the Wii U gamepad, while the others played from the TV. I miss the era of couch multiplayer games. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Land
- wffurr 4mo agoThat era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder. It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse. I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.
- jader201 4mo agoIt may not be completely over, but it’s far from the focus of multiplayer gaming. Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do. The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did). I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007). Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games. (And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)
- tantalor 4mo agoThe swipe controls are solid trash
- aiibe 4mo agoCool game
- csande17 4mo agoThis project appears to be vibe-coded; the game itself was added in a single squashed commit, but the author then used Claude for an extremely trivial "add a link to the bottom of the page" follow-up. The code for the game also has some comments that look pretty reminiscent of AI (e.g. describing the game board as being "validated", as in the LLM double-checked that it made sense). As a game it doesn't seem especially well-designed. In particular the author has missed a key aspect of the original Pac-Man, which is that ghosts have to run back to the start when they're eaten and that gives Pac-Man time to freely move around and eat dots. Instead, getting eaten teleports both you and Pac-Man back to the starting positions and consumes a life. You get three lives, so it's way too easy to just tank two power pellets and then keep Pac-Man trapped in the bottom half of the level forever (aided by his not-great AI logic, as other commentors mention). Personally, I found this take on the "Pac-Man but you're the ghosts" idea more interesting and less obviously plagiarized: https://youtu.be/96xNkL1Z_8M https://youtu.be/96xNkL1Z_8M
- Noehy 4mo agoI actually love playing this and would love to see a more polished version. Really cool spin oon the PacMan concept.
- peer2pay 4mo agoBack in the glory days of hackathons my now-wife and I wrote a multiplayer version of pac-man where one player controlled pac-man and the other was a ghost. We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- rambojohnson 4mo agoI never laughed so hard at a game. bravo. great job!
- simur 4mo agoThis reminded me of a high school thing we had with my colleagues. There was Java game called Pac-Man that had multiplayer built-in that was based on a Bluetooth connection. One of the players was Pac-Man and up to 4 players were ghosts. What a great game. We played it non stop for the whole semester. Even during boring classes.
- simur 4mo ago[dead]
- butlike 4mo agoIncredible concept. It's a little easy to figure out how to game the pac-man's movement, but I can't stress enough: incredible concept.
- butlike 4mo agoPac-Man: Chaos version One person plays pac-man Two people play the 4 ghosts, 1 stick for each ghost on a dual stick controller. One person plays the floor, and can rotate the game world clockwise or counter-clockwise.