Pac-Man Remake

About The Game

Pac-Man Remake is a top-down 2D survival game developed in Unreal Engine 5.4. This was the Level 4 engines project of my games design course at South Gloucestershire & Stroud College (WISE Campus), with me working as a solo developer.

We were given 3 traditional grid-based arcade games to choose from; Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Frogger. I chose Pac-Man, designing the project with the goal of recreating the original arcade version of Pac-Man as accurately as possible, in 16 weeks.

The game functions almost identically to the arcade version of Pac-Man, where each level has 244 pellets to eat, whilst avoiding the ghosts. These ghosts can be eaten during their frightened period, triggered after you eat one of the flashing energizers. As the current level increases, the ghosts will speed up as well as their frightened period shortening. The bonus fruit spawned when you have eaten 70 and 170 pellets can be used to determine the current level, as it changes to award more points as you progress.

Faithful to the original, the ghosts all have unique behaviours;

• Blinky (Red)
  • Directly chases the player
• Inky (Blue)
  • Chases double the vector from Blinky's location to the location of 2 tiles ahead of the player
• Pinky (Pink)
  • Chases 4 tiles ahead of the player
• Clyde (Orange)
  • Chases the player when more than 8 tiles away, otherwise runs to the bottom-left corner of the maze

There are differences with my version, but this is mostly down to the timing of certain actions and animation framerates. The randomised behaviour of the ghosts is also not the same, as it uses a different seed for random number generation. This causes the movement patterns to be different to the original, but still predictable.

 

Credits

© Bandai Namco Entertainment

© South Gloucestershire & Stroud College

Person	Role(s)
Declan Lloyd	Programmer
Superjustinbros	Sprite Sheets
Jamey Pittman	Dossier of Gameplay Mechanics

 

Controls

Input(s)	Action
W,A,S,D Arrow Keys Left Thumbstick Right Thumbstick D-Pad	Movement
Any Key	Interact

 

How To Play

You find yourself in a strange maze full of pellets, with a multitude of colourful ghosts on your tail. You can only assume your means of escape is by eating all of the delicious pellets in your path.

But wait! Some rare bigger pellets make the ghosts scared of you, causing them to run away. This is your chance, if you eat them now you must be in for a good bonus reward!