Pacman Begins

[Andre Leao]

Released, so addictive...





https://planetasinclair.blogspot.com/20 ... egins.html

✓ PROCESSED

DH 10/02/24

[DVDfever]

I've had a go here. It's interesting.

[gabriele amore]

This is a very good and interesting game:
the gameplay is reduced to the bare minimum and yet it is so very addictive!
I think this is because of the attention to details that Highrise poured into it:
the graphics (with all those nice subtle touches), the movement, the sprite masking, the animation, the frantic action
i think there is a lot that goes under the hood... what shows is really really good! CONGRATS!

[highrise]

Thank Gabriele, I did indeed work really hard on not cutting any corners, which is really important when you have minimal gameplay.

[patters]

That looks and sounds great, can't wait to try it. Good name too!

[Mpk]

14160

This is surprisingly great!

I do think I saw a bug where I half-ate a power pill which disappeared but I didn't get powered up. Like I turned around while eating it at just the wrong moment? Still, great work.

[cmal]

Just gave this one a go and now I see what all the fuss is about! This is an amazing little 1-key addictive game and very well converted. Very well Done @highrise ! Now let me get back to playing it...

[R-Tape]

Nicely done! I had my doubts about whether there was much to the idea, but there is a great game here. It's really well made as well - that glorious Pacman racket places you right in front of an arcade cabinet. Well done @highrise.

It's plain sailing... until red turns up. 12730 so far.

[Lee P]

Excellent! I like how it gets increasingly difficult as new ghosts are introduced (whereas Paku Paku just gets faster).

15440 to beat! (annoyingly I got 15420 straight afterwards, pesky red)

[Morkin]

This is ace..! Perfect game to have with my weekend morning coffee...

14,320. Gets a bit frenzied after a while.

[PROSM]

Great one-key game! As others have said, the attention to detail is what really makes it special. I've managed up to 18420 so far, but keep ending up tapping Space twice instead of once, sending me straight into the ghost.

[highrise]

Nice to see you guys getting a high score game going. Andre is the master though, he has a ridiculous score of about 80,000 or more. Mad skills!

[highrise]

here's a few little tips:

The fruits are set so that they appear only after a certain number of dots are eaten, and they will only appear when you are closer to the edges of the screen. This was a design choice to stop people lurking in the centre, more risk more reward.

The other way to score big points is the ghost multiplier, the trick to getting up to 1600 is to eat about half the dots before eating the ghost, giving you time to do the same in the next round and get the bonus points.

Once you get to the red ghost, and especially after two rounds, he will move faster than you in all circumstances. Therefore it's generally wiser to turn him blue and use the time to clear the round. As soon as you eat the red ghost, you should hightail it for the centre as he will respawn very quickly.

[highrise]

oh, and a little bit of tech stuff.

The pills and maze walls are laid out in such a way that facilitates fast drawing and by shifting everything down a little, allows the fruit to be multicoloured. I had originally planned for this game to use a multicolour trick to give the ghosts white eyes but in the end the masking was enough to make it look decent enough - interestingly only the ghosts are masked, pacman, being a solid block of pixels, only needed to be drawn with OR. Because the play area is so small, everything inside the 48 character square play area is drawn and wiped every cycle directly to screen with no buffer - It being in the centre of the screen means that it all gets done before the beam arrives, and so is rock solid. This also makes spawning or removing anything from play a lot simpler too.

Black attributes are used on the tunnel, again for speed purposes, as well as on the small fruit and life icons.

Most of the above can seen in this shot with attributes removed.

[Mpk]

28420!

[uglifruit]

What a great one-button game. Super playable and addictive with a top notch level of gloss.

(And if you've not checked out the other things on @highrise's Itch/Patreon they're all well worth a play!)

[Lee P]

28420!

Ah, and I was just going to come on here and boast about 26300

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Besides its adictiviness, I like the look of the game, the letter fonts, the graphics and the sounds so similar to the original arcade.

Great work!

[Lee P]

Oof, nearly got to 30000

[PROSM]

45100 - a new personal best. I've just started to figure out the strategy for getting the red ghost right up against the opposite screen edge when there's some pellets still in the centre, but the issue is putting that into practice with consistency. I would have been happy enough to stop at ~20k, but knowing Andre has managed above 80k has got me trying to beat him now

[Lee P]

I've been playing on and off all weekend, shouting "bloody red bloody bar steward" every couple of minutes.

Going to be late for work this morning because of this:

[PROSM]

Was aiming just to pip Lee's score, and ended up with...



195600... Your turn, Andre

Once you have the technique down, it's more a case of trying to maintain concentration than anything else. After I was past the slight jittery feeling at 70k, knowing that Andre's record was near, it became quite relaxing in a way. My decline began at about 160k, when I started to realise that if I kept this up, I could end up spending far longer on the game than I'd planned! Next goal, if I can make it, is to see what happens when the score overflows.

I know it's only February, but this is definitely one of the best games of 2024. Such a delightful concept and a skilled execution!

[Andre Leao]

Very, good, eheh. Congrats!

[Lee P]

Bloody hell! *throws in towel*

[Lee P]

I'll have to start another hi-score challenge: "Biggest score without pressing a button".