Not really a demo but one of the games he (Kenta Cho) has created using his own library. Imagine it as his yoga or meditation practice. The outlet for his creativity. The Crisp Gane Lib framework allows him to implement game ideas extremely quickly with little friction. Gameplay first!
[edit] It seems that Pixi is one rendering method, and the graphics themselves are abstracted via a "terminal" and "view" class, so the engine focuses on positioning art rather than handling sprite draws directly.
It's a nice set of opinionated choices. In particular, implementing collisions for 2D sprites. I built a game engine like that with particles and collisions (and particle collisions!) in AS3 on top of Starling at one point... sadly, I can't make games with it anymore.
That's more fun than I expected it to be! I like all the little subtle choices - how the ghost respawns, the speed of the ghost vs pac-man, the time it takes for the ghost to flash. It's simple, but I could feel myself learning the timing as I played and working through the strategy, such as it was.
Should be named ·--· ·- -·- ··- ·--· ·- -·- ··- . ("Paku paku" in morse, though I changed the characters to be more obviously plausibly one dimensional themselves so your favorite converter may not work.)
Controls would be better if left arrow went left, and right arrow went right. As is, they both toggle, which can lead to wrong inputs when trying to stall (left/right in succession)
I was trying to figure out why I despise the controls. I think you are right. The first time I hit left it did something, the second time it ignored me.
Wow, that's fun. I wish I could articulate why the music and dying sound effect are both so great. The gameplay has a great rhythmic feeling to it. It's also really tense. I scream every time that damn ghost catches me.
The best part is when I die I feel like I made a dumb mistake, and that if I improved just a few things I could be way better.
Too many games these days give you the allure of depth and complexity by making things difficult in the wrong ways.
Isn't the ghost spawn at least somewhat predictable?
I think it picks the farthest edge from where you ate it. Also, it only spawns at the edges, so don't eat the ghost near the edge if you're not sure where it will spawn.
Yes the ghost is faster than you, but it can't wrap around the stage like you can.
The best part is when I die I feel like I made a dumb mistake, and that if I improved just a few things I could be way better.
I think I've heard Miyamoto talk about that. When the frustration is all with yourself (rather than with the game itself), and you just know that if you try one more time, that'll be the one where you won't make any dumb mistakes. I think it's the cornerstone of every action game that appeals to me.
There is something to be said about “easy to learn difficult to master” curve, as well as overall basic simplicity and the feedback loop being very transparently clear and “tactile.”
The one game that never fails to hook me in that way is Quake 3. Every mistake feels like your own, but with a very clear and obvious path for improvement. Every improvement step feels incremental and doable, none of that “noscope 180 from the bushes where i had zero chance to spot the enemy” situations.
Even on kills where it initially felt like some annoying cheap trick, i watch the killcam, and walk away very impressed and eager to try out their approach myself. And it always makes perfect sense. As opposed to a lot of more modern games, where killcam only frustrates me more.
Imo this is the same thing that made the original DOOM a massive sensation, but I feel like Quake 3 would be easier to relate to for a lot of people (on HN or elsewhere). At the time, I was too young and growing up in a wrong part of the world to catch that original DOOM hype. But with Quake 3 (and imo even quake 1 and 2), that phenomenon truly transcended countries and cultures.
It sounds like you need to experience eight bit computing! My Commodore 64 from 1986ish still lives after a re-capping a few years ago. I grew up with Sinclair ZX80, 81 and Speccy too.
Nowadays we have such capable hardware that we can model near photorealistic stuff in real time. Not quite but not far off.
Those manic sounds and graphical effects are what you get when the hardware is very limited and some very talented people decide they want more, a lot more.
See if you can run up a simulator and get something like a Jeff Minter game running on whatever your IT gear is. You may like Attack of the Mutant Camels - the sounds are quite surreal, given the target hardware.
Consider taking a look at RetroPie or something similar.
I think you're appreciating (what I also appreciate) that the chomp, ghost bite sound, and death sounds are all in the same tempo/bpm, so that when things happen it's in "rhythm"
If you look closely, the chomping visual doesn't -actually- match up with the chomp sound, it's closer to if there was a track of chomping at a certain chomps per minute that gets toggled on/off if pacman is chomping. Same with everything else-is, so you mute/unmute sounds when the event happens, rather than trigger a sound play.
It better be landscape only on mobile. Add a pitfall bomb (what was that game that created a hole for the critters to fall into, and you could walk over them, but the climb out and the hole heals in a short period... ? Let the ghosts to fall in a hole, then you can place more than one ghost on the path, but you need as many "hole bombs" as there are ghosts on screen+1 (or N)... to not make it rage quit-worthy.
"what was that game that created a hole for the critters to fall into, and you could walk over them, but the climb out and the hole heals in a short period..."
It was hard until I realized that the ghost doesn't change when you cross the edge of the screen. After that, it turned into an uninteresting stalemate.
The controls really need to be edited, though. Left should be exclusively left, and right exclusively right. Having them both toggle makes input the primary challenge.
Per my experience The optimal strategy is to deprioritize eating the ghost. You can get some nice streaks sometimes eating him but it generally doesn’t help.
What you want to do is use the power up to collect the middle dots. The sides you can collect safely on reflexes alone. By about 3000 points it becomes impossible to recover if you don’t pick up the middle and have consumed your power up. Eating the ghost is ok if it happens incidentally.
Because you’re trying to use the power up to collect the middle that often means the ghost will be further from the middle than you when you finish a line. So finish a line, then 180 immediately to collect the middle again. The worst case is you end up with your power up ending just as you’re finishing a line and you are on the side. But up until very high point values I think it’s always safe to grab the power up as it tends to be on the sides.
Edit: 6800
Might play more if other HNers step up their game :)
Heh. My first or second game, I just happened to get like 650 points. And then spent the next 20 minutes trying to figure out what the hell I had done. Turns out you can sometimes get into a rhythm where you don't even have to turn for a while and score a lot of points.
Mostly following your advice, I got 14257. I found if I could easily eat the ghost, it was worth taking a few extra steps to go for it. The real key is knowing you can successfully leave 6 on either side to carefully pick up after getting the middle.
YES! I play this way even with the original version on Atari, as well as all of the various other 8-bit versions (Ms. Pac Man, Super Pac Man, Pac Man Jr., etc.)
Crazy enough, that strategy really works! Barely got to 1000 by eating ghosts and easily to 5000 using your strategy.
I'd say there is even a (very slight) disadvantage to killing the ghost: As long as it's on screen (and preferably slowed down) you know where it is. Once you kill it, you don't know exactly when and where it will reappear.
Interestingly, the points you get for a kill are NOT tied to how many ghosts you've killed before. They only depend on the speed of the ghost, which in turn depends on your overall score.
So I think one addition to the strategy would be to try to keep the ghosts alive as long as practical early on, then start hunting them when you have, say, 1500+ points and kills can actually give a significant bonus.
11,800 with a multiplier of 40 ;D
It's really all about the endgame knowing when how to manipulate the ghost's position. Sometimes it's worth it to wiggle back and forth until the ghost gets close to you in the middle to be able to get the dots on the edge. But yes once you pick up the power-up you need to pick up the middle dots.
I have now had several games in the 17000s range although I see I’m not the top scorer here anymore. I don’t think I can go any faster without getting to a physical keyboard vs my touch screen!
A couple more notes: I see now that the score multiplier goes up by 1 for every row cleared AND for every ghost eaten. I don’t think this changes much about my recommended strategy except sometimes you can pause or delay to set up a free ghost kill without breaking the originally stated strat and it’s worthwhile to do so.
At very high levels (15000+) I’m finding it necessary to double tap rapidly to induce small pauses to let the ghost catch up. The timing of these pauses is very tough at high speeds. But the gameplay feels almost safer and more formulaic. Not sure if that’s a function of anything changing in particular. It might just be the normal Strat but fast enough that it normalizes. I might try to do this on a keyboard to get them frame perfect pauses going lol
Edit: worth noting my high score went from 7k to 16k in one game without realizing it had been a particularly good game. The scores ramp up very quick late game and it’s not quite as huge of a gap as you might think
The biggest part of my strategy is to do a lot of stutter steps/dash dancing to try and collect the power up as close to the ghost as possible. Doing so is more likely to lead to a sort of "combo" state where your pacman can spawn kill the ghosts without any additional input. Fast reflexes can keep your combo state going if you know when to stutter step and when to turn back around and start comboing again in the opposite direction Getting your game state into such a combo state is even stronger in the late game as your pacman moves so fast it can almost always set up for a lot of safe kills quickly. And additionally, as you pointed out, by getting a ghost kill for every power up you get, you hasten the speed at which you grow your multiplier
Only other observation has been that the common failure mode is screen wrapping while the ghost is fleeing but without enough time to kill him. Don’t do this. Just wait until he is chasing you to screen wrap.
This is so fun! Makes me feel like I’m conducting a 1 dimensional random walk. Who knows, maybe this is being used to generate pseudo stock prices or something.
241 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadhttps://abagames.github.io/joys-of-small-game-development-en...
[edit] It seems that Pixi is one rendering method, and the graphics themselves are abstracted via a "terminal" and "view" class, so the engine focuses on positioning art rather than handling sprite draws directly.
It's a nice set of opinionated choices. In particular, implementing collisions for 2D sprites. I built a game engine like that with particles and collisions (and particle collisions!) in AS3 on top of Starling at one point... sadly, I can't make games with it anymore.
I clicked on this link because it says “1D PacMan”
It made me think “how can Pac-Man be 1D?”
Is it possible to get a higher score than 29?
https://dev.to/abagames/how-to-realize-various-actions-in-a-...
Source: https://github.com/abagames/crisp-game-lib/blob/master/src/i...
Probably better to completely disable the arrow keys -- or better, limit it to the spacebar -- to reinforce single-button design.
Or, just intuitively support left & right.
The Joys of Small Game Development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37799387
The best part is when I die I feel like I made a dumb mistake, and that if I improved just a few things I could be way better.
Too many games these days give you the allure of depth and complexity by making things difficult in the wrong ways.
I don't feel like it was my mistake when I got killed often, for one thing the ghost is faster than me, sometimes respawns right next to me, ...
I think it picks the farthest edge from where you ate it. Also, it only spawns at the edges, so don't eat the ghost near the edge if you're not sure where it will spawn.
Yes the ghost is faster than you, but it can't wrap around the stage like you can.
I think I've heard Miyamoto talk about that. When the frustration is all with yourself (rather than with the game itself), and you just know that if you try one more time, that'll be the one where you won't make any dumb mistakes. I think it's the cornerstone of every action game that appeals to me.
The one game that never fails to hook me in that way is Quake 3. Every mistake feels like your own, but with a very clear and obvious path for improvement. Every improvement step feels incremental and doable, none of that “noscope 180 from the bushes where i had zero chance to spot the enemy” situations.
Even on kills where it initially felt like some annoying cheap trick, i watch the killcam, and walk away very impressed and eager to try out their approach myself. And it always makes perfect sense. As opposed to a lot of more modern games, where killcam only frustrates me more.
Imo this is the same thing that made the original DOOM a massive sensation, but I feel like Quake 3 would be easier to relate to for a lot of people (on HN or elsewhere). At the time, I was too young and growing up in a wrong part of the world to catch that original DOOM hype. But with Quake 3 (and imo even quake 1 and 2), that phenomenon truly transcended countries and cultures.
Nowadays we have such capable hardware that we can model near photorealistic stuff in real time. Not quite but not far off.
Those manic sounds and graphical effects are what you get when the hardware is very limited and some very talented people decide they want more, a lot more.
See if you can run up a simulator and get something like a Jeff Minter game running on whatever your IT gear is. You may like Attack of the Mutant Camels - the sounds are quite surreal, given the target hardware.
Consider taking a look at RetroPie or something similar.
If you look closely, the chomping visual doesn't -actually- match up with the chomp sound, it's closer to if there was a track of chomping at a certain chomps per minute that gets toggled on/off if pacman is chomping. Same with everything else-is, so you mute/unmute sounds when the event happens, rather than trigger a sound play.
Or so it sounds and seems to my ears and eyes.
It better be landscape only on mobile. Add a pitfall bomb (what was that game that created a hole for the critters to fall into, and you could walk over them, but the climb out and the hole heals in a short period... ? Let the ghosts to fall in a hole, then you can place more than one ghost on the path, but you need as many "hole bombs" as there are ghosts on screen+1 (or N)... to not make it rage quit-worthy.
If it were Landscape Only, it would create unnecessary friction.
We have invented a new word for you to incorporate into your comments:
"OPTIONS"
Cant turn. only damage the 1D path, to your advantage/detriment.
Your mechanic is Gauntlet. (best video game ever)
Lode Runner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWwyhymcDxI
The controls really need to be edited, though. Left should be exclusively left, and right exclusively right. Having them both toggle makes input the primary challenge.
It made me click on this link because it made me think “how can Pac-Man be 1D?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_1-D
https://archive.org/details/wolfenstein-1-d
Per my experience The optimal strategy is to deprioritize eating the ghost. You can get some nice streaks sometimes eating him but it generally doesn’t help.
What you want to do is use the power up to collect the middle dots. The sides you can collect safely on reflexes alone. By about 3000 points it becomes impossible to recover if you don’t pick up the middle and have consumed your power up. Eating the ghost is ok if it happens incidentally.
Because you’re trying to use the power up to collect the middle that often means the ghost will be further from the middle than you when you finish a line. So finish a line, then 180 immediately to collect the middle again. The worst case is you end up with your power up ending just as you’re finishing a line and you are on the side. But up until very high point values I think it’s always safe to grab the power up as it tends to be on the sides.
Edit: 6800
Might play more if other HNers step up their game :)
OP's score is just ludicrous.
I'd say there is even a (very slight) disadvantage to killing the ghost: As long as it's on screen (and preferably slowed down) you know where it is. Once you kill it, you don't know exactly when and where it will reappear.
Interestingly, the points you get for a kill are NOT tied to how many ghosts you've killed before. They only depend on the speed of the ghost, which in turn depends on your overall score.
So I think one addition to the strategy would be to try to keep the ghosts alive as long as practical early on, then start hunting them when you have, say, 1500+ points and kills can actually give a significant bonus.
A couple more notes: I see now that the score multiplier goes up by 1 for every row cleared AND for every ghost eaten. I don’t think this changes much about my recommended strategy except sometimes you can pause or delay to set up a free ghost kill without breaking the originally stated strat and it’s worthwhile to do so.
At very high levels (15000+) I’m finding it necessary to double tap rapidly to induce small pauses to let the ghost catch up. The timing of these pauses is very tough at high speeds. But the gameplay feels almost safer and more formulaic. Not sure if that’s a function of anything changing in particular. It might just be the normal Strat but fast enough that it normalizes. I might try to do this on a keyboard to get them frame perfect pauses going lol
Edit: worth noting my high score went from 7k to 16k in one game without realizing it had been a particularly good game. The scores ramp up very quick late game and it’s not quite as huge of a gap as you might think
The biggest part of my strategy is to do a lot of stutter steps/dash dancing to try and collect the power up as close to the ghost as possible. Doing so is more likely to lead to a sort of "combo" state where your pacman can spawn kill the ghosts without any additional input. Fast reflexes can keep your combo state going if you know when to stutter step and when to turn back around and start comboing again in the opposite direction Getting your game state into such a combo state is even stronger in the late game as your pacman moves so fast it can almost always set up for a lot of safe kills quickly. And additionally, as you pointed out, by getting a ghost kill for every power up you get, you hasten the speed at which you grow your multiplier
Only other observation has been that the common failure mode is screen wrapping while the ghost is fleeing but without enough time to kill him. Don’t do this. Just wait until he is chasing you to screen wrap.
One suggestion would be to not care what key is pressed, maybe just have any key change direction?
1D dungeon crawler hardware game.
https://www.wobblylabs.com/line-wobbler