Pac-Man, but you're the ghost
garrit.xyz104 points by mindracer 7 hours ago
104 points by mindracer 7 hours ago
You 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.
If you go left or right as the first move on mobile you can't get out of the box. Pretty frustrating.
the ghost is slightly faster which makes the game winnable. thanks for that. I noticed
The less dots there are the easier to "freeze" the game https://files.catbox.moe/g03iwa.gif
Sometimes 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.
On 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.
Could be my shitty phone, but the swipe lag is huge. I can swipe ~1s ahead of time and still miss a turn.
I don’t think you can take a turn until you hit a wall?
I don't think so -- I managed to turn while on long straights, but nearly always after the turn I wanted to make.
Pacman can escape more easily now that there's only one ghost.
For 400+ lines of html, not bad, even if it is AI generated: https://github.com/garritfra/pac-hunt/blob/main/index.html
Seems 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.
"Think about it. It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story."
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...
Cool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.
> 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.
I 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.
For me there seems to be latency registering the key press which results in frequently missing turns
The 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...I 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.
Yeah its AI slop without the corner easing. But maybe they can AI it better.
What about: Pac-Man, but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.
>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..
I’m struggling to even leave the ghost pen on iOS.
pretty 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.
I 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.
Your link is cut off or something. EDIT: the dot at the end is being cut off by the forum software it seems
Thanks - 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.
The ghosts are unable to reverse direction in Pac-Man. You should have your agent read this: https://pacman.holenet.info/
What 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.
haha just played so cool. I'm thinking of making online multiplayer game for this haha
I had this idea a very long time ago.. well before AI... so it was fun to see. Thanks... too easy tho.
should call it Nam-Cap
Cool AI slop but the lack of corner easing like the original game makes it less fun.
Are you talking about for the AI Pac-Man or the ghosts? Because the ghosts in real Pac-Man don’t have cornering.
kind of like the movie pixels :)
Why 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.
> 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.
You 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.
Why are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage?
It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man?
You do not move fast enough
the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection
Just down vote and move on. You're helping them generate better slop by providing input like this
> 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.