Pac-Man/STORY.md

Story

This is living document that describes the story of the project, from inspiration to solution. When a website is available, this document will help curate it's content.

Inspiration

I initially got the idea for this project after finding a video about another Pac-Man clone on YouTube.

This implementation was written in C++, used SDL2 for graphics, and was kinda weird - but it worked.

• I think it was weird because the way it linked files together is extremely non-standard. Essentially, it was a single file that included all the other files. This is not how C++ projects are typically structured.
• This implementation was also extremely dependent on OOP; Rust has no real counterpart for OOP code, so writing my own implementation would be a challenge.

Lifetimes

Rust's SDL2 implementation is a wrapper around the C library, so it's not as nice as the C++ implementation. Additionally, lifetimes in this library are a bit weird, making them quite difficult to deal with.

I found a whole blog post complaining about this (1, 2, 3), so I'm not alone in this.

Emscripten & RuggRogue

One of the targets for this project is to build a web-accessible version of the game. If you were watching at all during the Rust hype, one of it's primary selling points was a growing community of Rust-based web applications, thanks to WebAssembly.

The problem is that much of this work was done for pure-Rust applications - and SDL is C++. This requires a C++ WebAssembly compiler such as Emscripten; and it's a pain to get working.

Luckily though, someone else has done this before, and they fully documented it - [RuggRouge][ruggrouge].

• Built with Rust
• Uses SDL2
• Compiling for WebAssembly with Emscripten
• Also compiles for Windows & Linux

This repository has been massively helpful in getting my WebAssembly builds working.

Key Capturing Extensions in WASM Build

Some extensions I had installed were capturing keys. The issue presented with some keys never being sent to the application. To confirm, enter safe mode or switch to a different browser without said extensions. If the issue disappears, it's because of an extension in your browser stealing keys in a way that is incompatible with the batshit insanity of Emscripten.