pac-man

Python project · featured · game, pygame, duo

Pac-Man in Python, built as a duo with sylvzzz: a new maze every level and four ghosts that each hunt you differently.

• 4ghosts, each with its own target
• 10levels, a new maze each
• 0pygame imports in the game rules

The problem

Rebuild the 1980 arcade game in Python as a duo with sylvzzz, with a twist: every level is a fresh maze from an assigned maze package, so nothing about the board can be hard-coded. The game rules also had to stay independent from the graphics.

What I built

• My half was pacman.core, the game itself with no pygame anywhere: maze loading, levels, the player, the ghosts, scoring and the config parser. sylvzzz built pacman.ui (rendering, scenes, input). "core never imports pygame" was our contract from day one, and it lets every rule be tested headless on CI.
• A loader that expands the package's per-cell wall bitmasks into a (2w+1) x (2h+1) tile grid. It starts from solid walls and carves, so a tile it misses is a harmless wall, never a hole in the border.
• Ghost AI on corridor distances, not straight lines: cached BFS maps per target, and each ghost aims differently (one chases, one ambushes four tiles ahead, a shy one backs off when close, a whimsical one turns at random) so the pack surrounds you instead of queueing behind you.
• Scatter and chase phases for the first minute, frightened ghosts that flee along the BFS gradient, eaten ghosts whose eyes walk home, and ghosts 4% faster each level, capped at +40%.
• A config parser that never crashes on a bad value: missing keys take their default, out-of-range ones are clamped with a warning, and only an unreadable file or broken JSON stops the game, with one readable line instead of a traceback.
• Separate branches merged through pull requests, with CI (flake8, mypy, tests) and an automated AI review on every push.

The hard part

Making a random maze always playable. The package's closed "42" cells can wall off a pocket of corridor, and a pacgum in there can never be eaten, so the level never ends. Unreachable tiles are now sealed before anything is placed, and since tile (1, 1) may well be a wall in the next maze, nothing uses fixed coordinates: every spawn searches for the nearest open tile.

Built with

• Python 3.10+
• pygame-ce
• pytest
• flake8 + mypy
• GitHub Actions
• PyInstaller

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