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csande17 1 hours ago [-]
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
hoppp 20 minutes ago [-]
Based on your description you did play it. So thats a win for the author.
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.
Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.
This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.
wffurr 2 hours ago [-]
That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder.
It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.
I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.
jader201 2 hours ago [-]
It may not be completely over, but it’s far from the focus of multiplayer gaming.
Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do.
The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did).
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007).
Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games.
(And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)
geon 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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!
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 9 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 7 hours ago [-]
Just like the original Pac-Man game :)
akoboldfrying 6 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 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t think you can take a turn until you hit a wall?
akoboldfrying 5 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.
tantalor 2 hours ago [-]
The swipe controls are solid trash
Noehy 59 minutes ago [-]
I actually love playing this and would love to see a more polished version. Really cool spin oon the PacMan concept.
InvisibleUp 8 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.
ataru 8 hours ago [-]
Pacman can escape more easily now that there's only one ghost.
Cool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.
serious_angel 10 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 8 hours ago [-]
Where did you quote this from?
fphhotchips 10 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 9 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 8 hours ago [-]
For me there seems to be latency registering the key press which results in frequently missing turns
omoikane 10 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 7 hours ago [-]
Swipe controls on mobile worked well for me.
VectorLock 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah its AI slop without the corner easing. But maybe they can AI it better.
9 hours ago [-]
aiibe 1 hours ago [-]
Cool game
akoboldfrying 5 hours ago [-]
What about: Pac-Man, but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.
x______________ 4 hours 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 5 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of Coconut Simulator
sixothree 7 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 7 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 4 hours ago [-]
Should ghosts be able to go through walls?
kristopolous 4 hours ago [-]
the ghost is slightly faster which makes the game winnable. thanks for that. I noticed
Chazprime 7 hours ago [-]
I’m struggling to even leave the ghost pen on iOS.
asadm 10 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 10 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.
Your link is cut off or something. EDIT: the dot at the end is being cut off by the forum software it seems
vunderba 8 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.
paolomon 3 hours ago [-]
cool idea, good start!
tommypham 10 hours ago [-]
haha just played so cool. I'm thinking of making online multiplayer game for this haha
lowlevel 9 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 10 hours ago [-]
Cool AI slop but the lack of corner easing like the original game makes it less fun.
epcoa 9 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 8 hours ago [-]
Pac man in Pac-man has cornering.
ares623 9 hours ago [-]
Taste and care? In my slop? How dare you sir.
dfordp 9 hours ago [-]
kind of like the movie pixels :)
purple-leafy 8 hours ago [-]
should call it Nam-Cap
deadbabe 9 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 9 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 5 hours 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 5 hours 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 4 hours 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.
orphea 3 hours ago [-]
Fair enough!
blharr 5 hours ago [-]
Just down vote and move on. You're helping them generate better slop by providing input like this
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
You can’t downvote submissions, only comments.
csomar 9 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.
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
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
This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.
It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.
I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.
Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do.
The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did).
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007).
Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games.
(And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)
https://pacman.fandom.com/wiki/Maze_Ghost_AI_Behaviors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-1PnNSF350
We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...
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.
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.
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.
Replace ghosts with posts and you have dictated a normal HN user's life..
EDIT: Found it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E
For reference - it's a Gamecube game where the other players play as ghosts released all the way back in 2003.
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.
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.
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.
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.