Concept of project
I decided for the midterm project to design a game that is very similar to the maze action video game, Pacman. Therefore, the main concept of my game is that there is a main character that looks like a green arc who tries to avoid the ghost enemies and eat circles, the more circles the character eats the more points he gets. The player will win the game if he or she can eat fifteen circles before bumping into one of the ghosts. On the other hand, if one of these ghosts catches the player before reaching a score of 15 circles eaten, then the player will lose the game.
I decided to create a game with this concept because I enjoyed playing Pacman as a kid and wanted to explore if I might be able to make a game that is very similar to my favorite childhood game. To make this project even more interesting, I decided to change some of the instructions of the normal Pacman game. If the main player eats a circle, the circle should change colors from yellow to red. Moreover, the main player can eat a circle more than one time. These new rules are what made this game even more exciting to play.
Project Implementation
To implement this project, I created four different scenes. I also used game state variables to transfer between scenes. These scenes are mainly the main menu scene represented by the start state, the game scene represented by the playing state, the winning scene, and the closing scene which are represented by the winning and losing states respectively. You can find an image of the instruction page and game scenes attached below. To play the full game and see the code press here: https://editor.p5js.org/AhmadFraij/sketches/7QkOMfogm
Game Design & Technical Decisions
In the main menu scene, I loaded an image of Pacman and three ghosts and made it the background of my main menu screen. On top of this background, I added the title of the game along with the instructions using the text function in p5.js and preloaded a special font type into the game. The game should receive input from the user which is pressing the enter button to move to the game scene.
To create the game scene, I designed a maze using different sizes of rectangles. Then, I used object-oriented programming to come up with the main player. Therefore, I created the main player class and defined a constructor with all the necessary variables, and added other functions inside the class that controls the motion of the main player and check if the player hits any of the rectangles inside the maze.
Most importantly, I created some circles around the maze and added a function that determines whether the main player is eating a circle. If this condition is met, then I increment the score until I reach the value needed to win the game. Furthermore, I created a class for the enemy ghosts, and whenever one of these ghosts’ positions equals the position of the main player then the user loses the game.
I was proud of how I linked the different scenes in the game by using a game state method that I understood from Professor Mang’s code. Furthermore, I am proud of how I was able to apply the score counter. To make the score counter work, I kept track of the previous counter and only incremented the previous counter after the current counter is incremented, in this way I made sure that the score only increments by 1 because when I first did the scoring algorithm I used to have the issue of having the counter increasing more than one unit.
While developing this game I also faced so many issues. It was so difficult for me to determine when a moving ghost hit a moving main player. However, after trying different ways I realized with the help of the professor that the best way to do this is by creating a class for the ghosts and a class for the main player and having a function in the ghosts class that takes the x and y positions of the main player and compares them with current x and y positions of every ghost.
Furthermore, figuring out how to check whether the main player eats one of the circles took so much time and I implemented it using so many if statements. Therefore some future improvements to this game would be to create a separate class for the yellow circles and have a function inside these classes that determines whether the main player hits a circle or not. Finally, I added some sound effects to the game to make it more interesting