Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

mmindracer about 5 hours ago 36 commentsRead Article on garrit.xyz

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

71% Positive

Analyzed from 815 words in the discussion.

Discussion (36 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pmontra•about 3 hours ago

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.

arcastroe•about 3 hours ago

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.

arcanemachiner•43 minutes ago

Just like the original Pac-Man game :)

ataru•about 2 hours ago

Pacman can escape more easily now that there's only one ghost.

haunter•about 1 hour ago

The less dots there are the easier to "freeze" the game https://files.catbox.moe/g03iwa.gif

InvisibleUp•about 2 hours ago

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.

foo12bar•about 2 hours ago

For 400+ lines of html, not bad, even if it is AI generated: https://github.com/garritfra/pac-hunt/blob/main/index.html

exolab•about 1 hour ago

AI generated? The humanity!

Chazprime•41 minutes ago

I’m struggling to even leave the ghost pen on iOS.

sixothree•about 1 hour ago

The ghosts are unable to reverse direction in Pac-Man. You should have your agent read this: https://pacman.holenet.info/

sparky_z•about 1 hour ago

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.

Teknomadix•about 4 hours ago

Cool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.

fphhotchips•about 4 hours 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•about 3 hours ago

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.

nfw2•about 2 hours ago

For me there seems to be latency registering the key press which results in frequently missing turns

serious_angel•about 4 hours ago

    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...

keyle•about 2 hours ago

Where did you quote this from?

omoikane•about 4 hours ago

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.

staindk•about 1 hour ago

Swipe controls on mobile worked well for me.

VectorLock•about 4 hours ago

Yeah its AI slop without the corner easing. But maybe they can AI it better.

3-cheese-sundae•about 3 hours ago

"Think about it. It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story."

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...

asadm•about 4 hours ago

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.

vunderba•about 4 hours ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E

ofrzeta•about 2 hours ago

Your link is cut off or something. EDIT: the dot at the end is being cut off by the forum software it seems

vunderba•about 2 hours ago

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.

lowlevel•about 3 hours ago

I had this idea a very long time ago.. well before AI... so it was fun to see. Thanks... too easy tho.

tommypham•about 4 hours ago

haha just played so cool. I'm thinking of making online multiplayer game for this haha

purple-leafy•about 2 hours ago

should call it Nam-Cap

dfordp•about 3 hours ago

kind of like the movie pixels :)

VectorLock•about 4 hours ago

Cool AI slop but the lack of corner easing like the original game makes it less fun.

epcoa•about 3 hours ago

Are you talking about for the AI Pac-Man or the ghosts? Because the ghosts in real Pac-Man don’t have cornering.

VectorLock•about 2 hours ago

Pac man in Pac-man has cornering.

ares623•about 3 hours ago

Taste and care? In my slop? How dare you sir.

deadbabe•about 3 hours ago

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.

Reubend•about 3 hours 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.

csomar•about 3 hours 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.