Gamestyle of Pacman

I was given the charge last week of writing a minigame for Playstation Home. A place i am sure not too many developers are really familiar with, heck i am certain there are very few developing for this great place on everyones PS3.

I was told the game style would be a bit like Pacman. Though the actual design was not done, and yet i was ready to start coding immediately. So i decided i did not require a full design, after all Pacman had very select and very few elements in its game. So off i went coding the Dots and the basic control of the player. This btw was a good way for me to get back into coding not just in Lua but also in the Home SDK (HDK). It has been over a year since i last did anything personally inside home (Midway2).

I have to say it took me very little time to get back into the swing of things. Soon enough i had this enemy elements along with picking up or eating the Dots i ran over. Now i wasn't sure what the Maze was going to be, there had been a couple of suggestions bandied about, so i decided to ignore all of them :)

Istead i made the maze not a maze at all. Let me explain, hehe. I created a simple layout of a 10 x 10 grid, and placed the Dots on those grid points. Then i allowed the player to just roam around the whole square playfield area at will. finally my last idea came into play with the enemies. Not so much ghosts but aggressively moving objects that would just run you over if you got in the way. No AI required. I have them now randomly appearing round the edge of the square playfield area and then rolling along quite mindlessly. I have some gameplay elements to make this a bit nmore friendly amd playable. Essentially though i have written pacman. You run around collecting the 100 Dots and when they are done you get a new playfield full of them.

Then to make it more interesting as i was having fun, i added certain other gameplay elements. such as when a sheet or level is completed, you will get another enemy added to the horde. Oh i forgot to mention there are 6 enemies on the first level and they can go all the way up to 20. One touch is death.... I also added in 3 lives and a high score retention. Then on friday afternoon the fun realy started after i tidied up a few bugs. I had a few other workmates play the game and now i have a target of 731 to beat, yay!

On friday i also found out that this game style was now superfluous and i was charged with working on something completely different. Bah!

Thoughts...
Although the game is not needed, i may just add a few other touches to it. I have to say I think it is possible to make a nice feeling and progressive game out of nearly any idea, and although eating the dots is the only real pacman idea in this game, it was still a good starting point.  Now if only Xblig had leaderboards i would write the game for that platform and make it multiplayer as well. Oh well :(

Laters
Da Voodoochief