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Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior

Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior
Posted on December 2, 2010 It only seems right for me to begin this blog with the topic that inspired me to start it in the first place. Not too long ago, I came across Jamey Pittman’s “Pac-Man Dossier”, which is a ridiculously-detailed explanation of the mechanics of Pac-Man. I found it absolutely fascinating, so this site is my attempt to discover and aggregate similarly-detailed information about other games (albeit in much smaller chunks). About the Game “All the computer games available at the time were of the violent type - war games and space invader types. Pac-Man is one of the most iconic video games of all time, and most people (even non-gamers) have at least a passing familiarity with it. Every level of Pac-Man uses the same maze layout, containing 240 regular “food” dots and 4 energizers. Common Elements of Ghost Behaviour “Well, there’s not much entertainment in a game of eating, so we decided to create enemies to inject a little excitement and tension. The Ghost House Sources Related:  Game Design

Bloxorz,Free Online Strategy Game,Play Computer Puzzle Maze Games,Bloxorz Kids Flash Game,Children's PC Fun Play this Online Strategy Game - Bloxorz: This is a quality strategy / puzzle game which provides hours of fun passing the 33 stages. Your aim is to get the block to fall into the square hole and to stay on the board while moving the block toward the hole. There are bridges and switches. You must move the block on to a switch (marked X) or a circle-marked square. A switch can only be activated by a block standing on its end while the circle switch can be pressed on by any part of the block. Orange tiles are fragile, and the block cannot stand on its ends while on an orange tile. There is a split circle ( ) switch. Small blocks can activate circle switches, but not X switches. The Passcode, located in the top right corner, will allow you to return to the same level next time you play. Controls: Arrow keys - Up, Down, Left, Right Spacebar - to select the part of the block to control when separated

OOT2D Map Project - Accepting Community Sprites - Read Well as many of you know I have spent the majority of my time here mapping and really just creating sprites which might be of use to an OOT2D project (the reason most of the oldschool members came here in the first place). I have been looking at the map which I now have, with all of the areas which I have created and come to the conclusion I am over half way through. What with the holidays starting now and me having nothing to do, I thought I might make a project out of it and see what I could get done. I have created this with several things in mind, firstly the maps must be as true to the original as possible. Secondly they must fit into the LTTP / FSA style, and thirdly they must piece together correctly (even though the original OOT map failed at this). So, what do I have and need to do? This means that I have now complete my project! Some of the links went down. Thanks, MaJoRa New:I am opening this project to the public. Master Yoshi - Temple of Time in Hyrule Castle Market.

create your own font from your handwriting | Ask The Admin This is a cool little 10-15 minute activity that will keep on giving back to you for years to come. That’s right add that final customizing touch to your Windows, Linux or Mac machine – Your handwriting as a font! With some free time a visit to a website called YourFonts.com, a scanner and a printer you can create a font for use in any application on your computer. To me this sounded way too cool to pass up. I went and downloaded the printable template from here and carefully followed the steps. The template looks like this: You print it out and add your letters to each corresponding box. So if you just wanted to have a font contain numbers, letters or characters just fill in those. I was pretty excited, I grabbed a sharpie and went to work on my page. Now I messed around with the scanning properties and decided to use the grey scale you see above at 200dpi. Most scanning programs can save as for you. I filled in the fields uploaded and then waited about a minute to be show this:

The Webtender: Drinking Games. Have fun with The Webtender's collection of drinking games, but be extremely careful if you play any these games, especially the ones with high buzz factors. The collection was created as an aid to responsible adults who know their limits (and not to cross them) when it comes to drinking, and not to promote this kind of drinking behavior. You should of course be of legal drinking age if you want to play these games with beer or drinks, but anyone can play these games with non-alcoholic beverages as well. For more fun, visit the Web Site Index and go to one of the sites listed there. Home · Drink Recipes · Forums · Bookstore · Barstore · Web Index · Feedback

Experience Points: The Sensationalist: The Sound of Horror This post is part of "The Sensationalist," a continuing series here at Experience Points in which we examine games' abilities to evoke emotions and sensations in video game players. Please have a look at the series' introduction as well its previous entries. As always, we welcome your thoughts on all the matters we discuss, and look forward to analyzing one of gaming's most powerful, yet intangible, abilities. I have been wanting to do a Sensationalist post on horror games for some time now. In this sensationalist, I approach only one aspect of horror games: sound effects. Fear is universal. Environment Creaking wood is a horror genre staple, from the original Alone In The Dark to the latest iteration of the same game. An early entry to the 'make-people-piss-themselves-in-fear' category of games is Ken Levine's System Shock 2. The mechanical surroundings create an eerie contrast with organic enemies while playing off a fear of powerlessness in the face of human made constructs. Silence

Ten games that make you think about life At the start of this year, we decided to come up with a list of Flash casual games with a philosophical bent. To be honest, we struggled. After days of research, we could only find a handful of games that had the thought-provoking depth we were looking for. Our list (which you can view by clicking here) was therefore only five games long. Fast forward to now, and it is remarkable how much difference a few months can make. Thanks to the work of pioneers like Daniel Benmergui, Gregory Weir and PixelAnte, there is now an abundance of clever arty Flash games to pique our intellects, and as a result creating this follow-up list of games that make you think has been a doddle. In a wonderful twist, it seems it is the Flash gaming space - until now known more for the throwaway nature of its games rather than depth - that is leading the way in this exciting new area of gaming, as we hope the following games prove. 1Immortall The game starts with you crash landing on a planet. 2Loved 5Coma 6Loondon

How to Obscure Any URL How to Obscure Any URLHow Spammers And Scammers Hide and ConfuseLast Updated Sunday, 13 January 2002 NOTICE: the IP address of this site has changed of late, and I've been unable to set aside time for the rather large task of revising this page. Its numerous links to the old IP address won't work. It'll be updated soon! Since this page was first written in 1999, Internet Explorer and Netscape have both begun dealing with URLs differently, particularly in versions 6 and above. Some of the examples here will no longer work with those browser versions. The URL (Universal Resource Locator) of the page you are now viewing is It is also The weird-looking address above takes advantage of several things many people don't know about the structure of a valid URL. These tricks are known to the spammers and scammers, and they're used freely in unsolicited mails. How It's Done Go ahead and use the links.

About Us | Gosucoaching.com is a site dedicated to connecting gaming coaches with gaming students with the goal of improving everything from the most basic strategies to the most advanced counters and tactics. Our ultimate goal is to provide you, the customer (student) with a satisfying coaching experience -- one where you can apply what you have learned after each session immediately toward improved game play. Gosucoaching.com is also a resource for players who are just starting and want to fast track their gaming skills or the would-be "progamers" to round out the last few hurdles in their game play to bring them to the highest levels of game play. Gosucoaching.com provides rigorous quality control of its coaching staff, holding regular surveys from customers, internal validation testing, and coaches-only forums to discuss improved teaching methods , the latest build orders, strategies, counters and tactics for improved game play.

Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics - The Quixotic Engineer This summer I’ve been casually following Game Design Concepts, Ian Schreiber’s experimental online game design course. The curriculum has covered a number of thought-provoking concepts, but the real light bulb moment for me came in his discussion of the MDA framework1. Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek defined MDA in 2001 [PDF link]. It stands for mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics, the three layers that define a game. These words are often thrown around casually in game design discussions, but in MDA they have very specific meanings: Mechanics are the formal rules of the game. We can illustrate these concepts with the classic game Pac-Man. In his post on MDA, Schreiber also offers the following example: In a First-Person Shooter video game, a common mechanic is for players to have “spawn points” – dedicated places on the map where they re-appear after getting killed. We can see the contrast between these two perspectives in Clint and Ben’s writing about Far Cry 2.

Artificially intelligent vs. artificially human: creating better NPCs Usually, when we think of creating artificially intelligent characters in games, we think of making these characters smarter and better at responding to various situations. But at a Game Developers Conference presentation this week, two industry veterans suggested that we should take lessons learned from the study of human psychology to make characters more believably human, which doesn't necessarily mean "more intelligent." Conveying emotion is seven seconds Dave Mark of AI consulting firm Intrinsic Algorithm noted that the average character in many games is an enemy that only appears for seven seconds, which makes it hard to convey any meaningful characterization through traditional methods. Early game characters were like early silent movie characters, according to Mark, making exaggerated movements and using short audio "barks" to reveal their emotions. "Now, maybe it's time for us to learn how to be more subtle like the movie actors did." Exploiting player biases

EmbedPlus - Real-time reactions, chopping, movable zoom, slow motion, annotations, chapter / scene skipping, and more with embeds on your video site, blog, vlog, etc. < embed plus > Bethesda History A new All Your History is underway and this time its about Bethesda, that is awesome its the one company I really wanted to here about (since I really didn't take interest in them until after Morrowind) so I hope its a good series. Bethesda Part 1: The Open World All Your History - Bethesda Part 1: The Open World (S03E26)Bethesda Softworks publish some of the most critically acclaimed RPGs of all time. In this first episode of our retrospective, watch and see how the company got its start making the least geeky games of all -- football games.This video will show you... HOW TO make football games HOW TO make football games for somebody else HOW TO realize you're a nerd and make RPGs instead Bethesda Part 2: Overload All Your History - Bethesda Part 2: Overload (S03E28)Bethesda Softworks publish some of the most critically acclaimed RPGs of all time. Bethesda Part 3: Rebirth Bethesda Part 4: The Next Level Bethesda Part 5: Maxed Stats

Game Design Tools for Collaboration Game Design Tools for Collaboration By Damien Djaouti Can a tool for modeling game design make it easier for designers to work with engineers? Many different tools and frameworks have been proposed, and researcher Damien Djaouti explores them for practicality and adaptability. This article presents a selection of "formal game design tools" that may be able to bring game design and software engineering closer. Traditionally, to present his work to the rest of the team, a game designer writes a Game Design Document that details every aspect of the game. Instead, they are experimenting new methods tailored for the communication needs between disciplines. Among these books and research articles, some game designers are proposing tools that intend to formalize game design. To try to answer this question, we gathered a corpus of books and articles related to game design, ranging from 1999-2012. Through this article, we will highlight four models that enable designers to model a game structure.

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