Groovy Pacman is based on a fairly simple Java implementation of the famous 80’s game Pacman. The original sources stem from the Java 2D Games Tutorial on zetcode.com, which contains and explains implementations of a number of classic games, aside from a rudimentary version of Pacman. Definitely worth a visit!
The idea is to start-off with Zetcode’s Java 2D tutorial version and transform it into a nice playable game that eventually will run on an Arcade Game console such as in figure 1.
The hardware part will be an interresting project on it’s own, involving building a cabinet from wood, paint it properly and assemble the electronics probably using a RPi and buttons and stuff from Adafruit or a similar shop. The original Zetcode implementation of the game is fairly limited though. The original Arcade version from the 80’s is far more advanced from a functional perspective. So I’d like to bring back in the missing functional elements as well, apart from the technical porting of the game.
The original 80’s Pacman had four distinct ghosts named Blinky (the red one), Inky (blue), Pinky (pink, obviously) and Clyde (orange). They all had distinctive behaviour when chasing Pacman. I’d like to put those behaviours back in. And replace the simple white sprites for the original sprites, including moving eyes ofcourse. Furthermore there is only one level at the moment, utilizing a (too) simple maze. Would be nice to have multiple levels and mazes that look more like the original game. Big help to reconstruct both maze and ghosts is the Pacman addicts corner site.
The original Zetcode sources are written in a rather procedural manner: it’s just two files basically, called Game and Board. The Game 'class' actually just contains some bootstrap code and the entire game itself is contained in the Board class. We can do a lot better than that, using object-oriented and functional paradigms where appropriate.
The GUI code of the original Zetcode sources use old-school Java Swing libraries. Nowadays locally running GUI’s are out-of-fashion anyway, but for games it still makes sense. However, Swing really is outdated by now. Maybe nice to give its successor a try which is nowadays OpenJFX, since Oracle donated the JavaFX part of the JDK to the the OpenJDK project. However, in the Java8 SDK JavaFX classes are still there so ot seems we do not need extra libs to get started. I’ll check out this intro to JavaFX for game development and take it from there.
The gradle build will create a TAR and/or ZIP distribution containing a convenient start script to run the game. Just take the TAR or ZIP, unpack it wherever you want and run the script for your system from a terminal window.
Additionally, you will find a bunch of helpfull scripts in the script-folder:
This script will do exactly as described above: It will create and extract the distribution TAR file and run it from there.
This script will take the TAR distribution and convert it into a macOS executable, including a trimmed-down JDK
based on the JDK used to build the application. You may need to change the sdkVersion-variable to match the JDK you
want to use to build against. The script uses SDKman to temporarily activate that particular JDK during the build.
If that JDK is currently not available on your system, sdkman will tell you, and suggests the command to install it. The script
relies on sdkman and jpackage. If either one is missing, it will supply suggestions on how to get it.
When you are on another platform (Windows, Linux…) you should be able to tweak the script to produce a suitable executable
for your platform as well. Just find the tools-section from the documentation of your JDK, and check the platform specific
settings you need to supply to jpackage.
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Port to Groovy 2.5 or 3.0, just for fun. Porting to Groovy 3 would also require JDK 9+
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Refactor the code a bit since it does not really separate concerns very well
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Port the GUI part from Swing to (Open) JavaFX