Pac-Man/README.md

Pac-Man

Description

A faithful recreation of the classic Pac-Man arcade game written in Rust. This project aims to replicate the original game's mechanics, graphics, sound, and behavior as accurately as possible while providing modern development features like cross-platform compatibility and WebAssembly support.

The game includes all the original features you'd expect from Pac-Man:

• Classic maze navigation and dot collection
• Four ghosts with their unique AI behaviors (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde)
• Power pellets that allow Pac-Man to eat ghosts
• Fruit bonuses that appear periodically
• Progressive difficulty with faster ghosts and shorter power pellet duration
• Authentic sound effects and sprites

Built with SDL2 for cross-platform graphics and audio, this implementation can run on Windows, Linux, macOS, and in web browsers via WebAssembly.

Feature Targets

• Near-perfect replication of logic, scoring, graphics, sound, and behaviors.
• Written in Rust, buildable on Windows, Linux, Mac and WebAssembly.
• Online demo, playable in a browser.
• Automatic build system, with releases for Windows, Linux, and Mac & Web-Assembly.
• Debug tooling
  • Game state visualization
  • Game speed controls + pausing
  • Log tracing
  • Performance details

Experimental Ideas

• Perfected Ghost Algorithms
• More than 4 ghosts
• Custom Level Generation
  • Multi-map tunnelling
• Online Scoreboard
  • WebAssembly build contains a special API key for communicating with server.
  • To prevent abuse, the server will only accept scores from the WebAssembly build.

Build Notes

• Install cargo-vcpkg with cargo install cargo-vcpkg, then run cargo vcpkg build to build the requisite dependencies via vcpkg.
• For the WASM build, you need to have the Emscripten SDK cloned; you can do so with git clone https://github.com/emscripten-core/emsdk.git
  • The first time you clone, you'll need to install the appropriate SDK version with ./emsdk install 3.1.43 and then activate it with ./emsdk activate 3.1.43. On Windows, use ./emsdk/emsdk.ps1 instead.
  • You can then activate the Emscripten SDK with source ./emsdk/emsdk_env.sh or ./emsdk/emsdk_env.ps1 or ./emsdk/emsdk_env.bat depending on your OS/terminal.
  • While using the web.build.ts is not technically required, it simplifies the build process and is very helpful.
    • It is intended to be run with bun, which you can acquire at bun.sh
  • Tip: You can launch a fileserver with python or caddy to serve the files in the dist folder.
    • python3 -m http.server 8080 -d dist
    • caddy file-server --root dist (install with [sudo apt|brew|choco] install caddy or a dozen other ways)