Hac-Man

Standard game screen
Player 1 (Pac-Man) wins if he eats all the dots
Player 2 (Ghost) wins if he gets eaten by Player 1 (Pac-Man)

Inspiration

We wanted to try our hands on a slightly more complicated game and also experiment with Websockets.

What it does

Multiplayer Pac-Man-inspired game, where one player takes the classic role of Pac-Man and the other plays as one of three ghosts. Pac-Man's goal is to eat all dots spread over the map. The ghost's goal is to lure Pac-Man into eating him after Pac-Man has collected one of his power-ups. For this the ghost has to be stealthy so he's indistinguishable from the other two AI-based ghosts.

Local multiplayer is supported with W,A,S,D and Up,Down,Left,Right controls. Online multiplayer is currently experimental and not deployed yet.

How we built it

All controls, ghost-AI and game logic in vanilla JavaScript using HTML5 canvas for rendering. Socket.io for Websocket API, jQuery for event handling and simple Python/Flask web-app.

Challenges we ran into

Collision detection on HTML5 canvas can be very tedious and inefficient.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Produce a sound codebase of roughly 1000 lines of JavaScript. Successfully emulating the old Pac-Man's feel and look.

What we learned

Object-Oriented JavaScript can be very fun and result in beautiful code. Using build tools like Brunch becomes essential after your codebase reaches a certain size.