alt Hacker NewsPac-Man, but you're the ghost
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This project appears to be vibe-coded; the game itself was added in a single squashed commit, but the author then used Claude for an extremely trivial "add a link to the bottom of the page" follow-up. The code for the game also has some comments that look pretty reminiscent of AI (e.g. describing the game board as being "validated", as in the LLM double-checked that it made sense).
As a game it doesn't seem especially well-designed. In particular the author has missed a key aspect of the original Pac-Man, which is that ghosts have to run back to the start when they're eaten and that gives Pac-Man time to freely move around and eat dots. Instead, getting eaten teleports both you and Pac-Man back to the starting positions and consumes a life. You get three lives, so it's way too easy to just tank two power pellets and then keep Pac-Man trapped in the bottom half of the level forever (aided by his not-great AI logic, as other commentors mention).
Personally, I found this take on the "Pac-Man but you're the ghosts" idea more interesting and less obviously plagiarized: https://youtu.be/96xNkL1Z_8M
You should add inky and pinky so you can corner pacman. Their movement is dependent on blinky, so you would be in control of all 3.
I never laughed so hard at a game. bravo. great job!
If you go left or right as the first move on mobile you can't get out of the box. Pretty frustrating.
The less dots there are the easier to "freeze" the game https://files.catbox.moe/g03iwa.gif
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.
The swipe controls are solid trash
Back in the glory days of hackathons my now-wife and I wrote a multiplayer version of pac-man where one player controlled pac-man and the other was a ghost.
We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!
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.
Pacman can escape more easily now that there's only one ghost.
I actually love playing this and would love to see a more polished version. Really cool spin oon the PacMan concept.
For 400+ lines of html, not bad, even if it is AI generated: https://github.com/garritfra/pac-hunt/blob/main/index.html
"Think about it. It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story."
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...
Cool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.
What about: Pac-Man, but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.
The ghosts are unable to reverse direction in Pac-Man. You should have your agent read this: https://pacman.holenet.info/
I’m struggling to even leave the ghost pen on iOS.
the ghost is slightly faster which makes the game winnable. thanks for that. I noticed
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.
Cool game
haha just played so cool. I'm thinking of making online multiplayer game for this haha
I had this idea a very long time ago.. well before AI... so it was fun to see. Thanks... too easy tho.
cool idea, good start!
Cool AI slop but the lack of corner easing like the original game makes it less fun.
kind of like the movie pixels :)
should call it Nam-Cap
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.
This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1]
It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV.
Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-person 3D perspective, rather than top-down.
The ghost that caught Pac-Man would get to take over as Pac-Man (which would inevitably result in a tangled mess of cords by the end).
It was a great couch 3v1 game.
The WiiU had similar mini-games in Nintendo Land [2], with one player operating the Wii U gamepad, while the others played from the TV.
I miss the era of couch multiplayer games.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Land