Pac-Man Diary #01

I’m not sure why, but I’ve decided to keep a diary of my development of a clone of Namco’s original Pac-Man using DarkBasic (this later changed to BlitzPlus – CG).

Who knows, maybe someone will find it interesting or useful!

The Maze
The Maze

Ok, first things first. I ran the original Namco Pac-Man (or is it Puckman?) in M.A.M.E and took a screenshot so I could nab the bitmap of the maze. Then I loaded it into Paint (my 30 day trial on PSP finally ran out on day 358!), and cleared all the pills and ghosts to leave just the plain maze. Using the default 640×480 mode I loaded this into DarkBasic and ran it. Good…..works fine, just need to centre it on the screen. Also nabbed one frame of Pac-Man himself, it’s the full circle frame so he’s just a yellow ball at the moment. I’ve decided to store all my sprites in another bitmap as 16×16 tiles as this fits exactly into the corridors of the maze.

Added some keyboard reads so I could move him around the maze pretending that all the colliision detection is in place. Keyboard control seems a bit fiddley, must look into that later.