Well, lets see if this game goes anywhere. I have hardly touched GM much for some time now. Start projects and then they just sit. I downloaded and played a few "Pac-Man" games over time and I figured I would tinker around with GM seeing if I could make something more authentic I guess. Pac-Man on the surface sounds straight forward. The basics anyway. Move around, eat dots, energizers, etc. But I want to try doing something (if I can) to put in the little details.

Like what? Well, with an original Pac-Man maze (or Hangly Man in this case) there are 4 "safe zones" (or semi-safe anyway). There were 4 points in the maze where monsters could not go from south to north unless they were blue. Pac-Man slowing down just a bit when eating dots. Monsters starting out "going to thier corners". Monsters slowing down in the tunnels. All the small little details (or as many as I can handle).

So what is Hangly Man? I saw two machines of this type way back in the 80's. A Pac-Man cabinet but a hacked program running on it. Here is what the original Hangly Man screen looks like…

<a href="http://imageshack.us"><img src="http://img463.imageshack.us/img463/3/hanglyoriginalec4.png" border="0" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us"/></a><br/>Shot at 2007-09-18

If you know the original Pac-Man maze you can see some differences with this one. There is also another screen in Hangly Man where there is no maze. Just dots scattered all over. Another touch was that when you would eat an energizer sometimes the maze would turn invisible.

Here is where I am at in GM after about a day….

<a href="http://imageshack.us"><img src="http://img117.imageshack.us/img117/9049/hanglytry3cy3.jpg" border="0" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us"/></a><br/>

I know…the circle things are missing yet in the maze. It's throwing me off a bit. It seems like all the rest of the maze is set up with pieces 16 X 16 pixels. Yet those funky circles… there are gaps of 15. Kinda wierd placement. I may scale them down a pixel or two to fit if I can't get it totally right. So far I have made maze pieces that match the original machine where you could put together any Pac-Man looking maze in no time. Took a while to shade them and make them all fit. I could give it the original wire thin look for the walls but wanted to give it a face lift. Hangly Man, the ghosts, dots and energizers are all rendered with 3-Space again. Great little program for rendering but hard to do something from scratch unless it's made of primatives. (Boxes, Cones, Spheres, etc…) There are pre-made models to play with. Sometimes you can cut out stuff to get what you need…but to build from the ground up, it is not well suited. The ghosts for example are just a sphere with a cone arround it and two more spheres for the eyes. The rest is just tweaking things by hand painting things in (or cutting out). The energizers flash (fade in and out) and Hangly Man is animated for up, down, left and right.

Well, hope I can actually "finish" a game for a change. It's been awhile but always alot going on around here.

Oh yeah…why is the maze green instead of blue? I am probably going to mix the original qualitys of Hangly Man with Pac-Man Plus (which had a green maze) along with a few rules from that game…such as eating an energizer may only turn 3 of the 4 ghosts blue. Or another one…eating the "prize" would turn the ghosts blue and they would be worth double the points.