Pac-Man

Created a Pac-Man clone in JavaScript and Canvas See it in action at https://cs.mcgill.ca/~ysarto/projectsDir/pac-man

Goals

After making Sudoku, I wanted to create something incredibly involved. So I decided that an arcade game from 40 years ago would be fun to make, especially one I played extensively throughout my childhood. I had numerous goals with this project, such as:

• utilizing modules, with a strong emphasis on inter-module communication
• trying to use good coding habits (reducing global variables, reducing redundancies, good class seperation, mvc, etc)
• animations based on the window.requestFrameAnimation function of JavaScript
• using sound effects (note: I purposfully omitted the background sound because I find it annoying)
• primitive AI
• much more complex graphics
• making a near clone of the original game, in terms of scoring, speed, difficulty, graphics, etc

On what can be improved

With a project this complex, there are inevitably a lot of additions that can be made to this project. These include, in increasing order of difficulty:

• adding a game over screen (right now I have a simple alert) (implemented)
• draw the outline and inline to be more reflective of the board to reduce clipping (implemented)
• making a check to prevent ghosts from getting stuck (I'd probably add a check to the move functions to see if the path is the same a where it is, and if so, move to a tile chosen at random) (implemented)
• allowing ghosts to use warps in chase mode (half implemented... they are more inclined but won't always)
• I improved ghost behaviour somewhat, but would like to improve it further

Bugs I have identified:

• Inky sometimes just strolls from warp to warp, going through stuff he shouldn't. (fixed)
• I haven't been able to reproduce this bug, but I think what happens is if you try to consume a ghost on the last frame of fright and are in the way of its path back to the maze, the game crashes with an error of a ghost moving in an illegal territory.
  • fix: I suspect this is due to a ghost being in a weird, quasi state. I haven't investigated this bug enough to identify a potential fix