Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

113 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by mindracer
(garrit.xyz)

53 Comments

beezlewax

an hour ago

If you go left or right as the first move on mobile you can't get out of the box. Pretty frustrating.

gus_massa

an hour ago

It's not imposible, but I agree that it's very hard.

oniony

26 minutes ago

I'm making a version where you're a pellet.

pmontra

6 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

6 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.

akoboldfrying

3 hours ago

Could be my shitty phone, but the swipe lag is huge. I can swipe ~1s ahead of time and still miss a turn.

tonmoy

2 hours ago

I don’t think you can take a turn until you hit a wall?

akoboldfrying

2 hours ago

I don't think so -- I managed to turn while on long straights, but nearly always after the turn I wanted to make.

ataru

5 hours ago

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

kristopolous

an hour ago

the ghost is slightly faster which makes the game winnable. thanks for that. I noticed

InvisibleUp

4 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.

Teknomadix

7 hours ago

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

fphhotchips

6 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

5 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

4 hours ago

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

serious_angel

6 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

5 hours ago

Where did you quote this from?

omoikane

6 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

4 hours ago

Swipe controls on mobile worked well for me.

VectorLock

6 hours ago

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

akoboldfrying

2 hours ago

What about: Pac-Man, but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.

x______________

an hour 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..

flux3125

2 hours ago

This reminds me of Coconut Simulator

Chazprime

3 hours ago

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

asadm

6 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

6 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

5 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

5 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.

sixothree

4 hours ago

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

sparky_z

4 hours 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.

xnx

31 minutes ago

Should ghosts be able to go through walls?

tommypham

6 hours ago

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

lowlevel

6 hours ago

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

VectorLock

6 hours ago

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

epcoa

6 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

5 hours ago

Pac man in Pac-man has cornering.

ares623

6 hours ago

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

dfordp

6 hours ago

kind of like the movie pixels :)

deadbabe

6 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

6 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.

NicuCalcea

an hour ago

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.

orphea

an hour ago

  Why are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage?
Because it looks good enough to "pass". People are consuming low quality content all the time.

  It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man?
Not true.

  You do not move fast enough
Not true.

  the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection
So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it? :)

latexr

39 minutes ago

> So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it?

I’m not going to comment on the code (I abandoned the page early due to the terrible controls) but there’s no contradiction in that part you’re commenting on. “Slop” doesn’t just mean “doesn’t work”; “programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes” doesn’t mean “the code is perfect”.

To output text in a terminal you could use `echo`, but you could also write a 500 line function which does a bunch of unrelated garbage then finally outputs the text perfectly (i.e. no mistakes). That doesn’t mean the code is good or even acceptable or desirable, even if the outcome is technically correct.

blharr

2 hours ago

Just down vote and move on. You're helping them generate better slop by providing input like this

latexr

37 minutes ago

You can’t downvote submissions, only comments.

csomar

5 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.