Really cool. Random generation plus Pac-Man plus the color swapping mechanic make for a game where it's incredibly satisfying to come up with strategies on the fly, as opposed to Pac-Man where you can pretty much use the same strategy every single level.
One thing I would improve is the controls, in Pac-Man one of my favorite things is the fact Pac-Man keeps moving even after you unpress a direction, and then buffer turns as you hold a key in the direction you're going to turn, even a second in advance. Here I stop when I unpress a direction, and while there's some kind of help rounding corners, you can press a turning direction before a corner and you'll still see the character change directions and bump against the wall which has screwed me up on a few occasions. I'll get too wrapped up in thinking about the game and Pac-Man instincts take over and I try to buffer a turn too early and I turn into the wall and get killed by a ghost.
Other then that, you seem to be aware of any other issues I had, so I won't complain about it. Awesome stuff, this game tickles my brain I love it.
Do you have 3rd-party cookies blocked? I had a similar problem in my own game, and maybe it's the same thing:
"if you block third-party cookies in Chrome, HTML5 games hosted on itch.io are denied access to LocalStorage and SessionStorage, even though it still works if you're testing using localhost, or on your own website." [dev log]
Other player workarounds: Unblock 3p cookies, or play the game in the itch.io app.
As a developer, I had to work around it by wrapping localStorage and sessionStorage access in try/catch blocks. I don't know if there's another way to detect that condition.
It took me quite a while to work out what was going on, and I still may not have grasped it completely...
...the colours vs. ghosts I did not get until I read the text (and obviously I didn't read the text at first). I like the idea but I think it needs signalling more, maybe have vulnerable ghosts flashing, or greyed, or something?) Also the "teeth" ghost is a bit mixed in its colouration and that confused me at times.
The teleporting around I still haven't completely worked out, is it just a way of respawning, or do some things that just teleport you? For a long time I thought the wheels were teleporters, but how I am thinking they are just monsters? This illusion (if correct) may be contributed to by I think there is a bug where occasionally I can be the right colour and still die (or at least teleport) when I hit a ghost.
Not sure what the flames are, are they ghosts in the process of respawning?
One feature of the original is that you cannot stop, I wondered whether you should also have that, but I think maybe with the arbitrarily complex mazes we need this additional option.
One feature I noticed about the mazes is that any area with limited exits is scary to enter when there are multiple ghosts around, so it would be an idea if you could guarantee that the level had a mix of scary and less scary areas (e.g. the sort of thing a human designer would intuitively do). You might be able to do that by making the maze generator start with larger rectangles (with a difficulty assigned to them) and recurse to filling in the final detail...
I wonder if a sequence of levels, where the difficulty and size vary as you progress would add a lot to the experience, e.g. give a clear sense of progressing and mix-up the experience with a bit of variety...
Love the look of it! Random gen is great and the color matching is a nice twist on the standard Pac-Man formula.
It's really challenging, which is cool, but sometimes feels a bit unfair. The main culprit of this feeling (I think) is the tendency for chasing ghosts to clump up next to each other. If the ghosts are the same color, it's no biggie—if they're different colors, then becomes a problem.
Some "personal space" logic that prevents them from getting too close to each other would help. Another option would be to subtly differentiate the pathfinding algorithm of one color from another. IE: if choosing between two directions where each direction is equally fast, blue always goes left and red always goes right. Could also do something as simple as make it so a chasing ghost has a % chance to take a sub optimal turn at any intersection.
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mason lindroth type beat
This F-in Rules!
This looks cooler every time I check on it.
Really cool. Random generation plus Pac-Man plus the color swapping mechanic make for a game where it's incredibly satisfying to come up with strategies on the fly, as opposed to Pac-Man where you can pretty much use the same strategy every single level.
One thing I would improve is the controls, in Pac-Man one of my favorite things is the fact Pac-Man keeps moving even after you unpress a direction, and then buffer turns as you hold a key in the direction you're going to turn, even a second in advance. Here I stop when I unpress a direction, and while there's some kind of help rounding corners, you can press a turning direction before a corner and you'll still see the character change directions and bump against the wall which has screwed me up on a few occasions. I'll get too wrapped up in thinking about the game and Pac-Man instincts take over and I try to buffer a turn too early and I turn into the wall and get killed by a ghost.
Other then that, you seem to be aware of any other issues I had, so I won't complain about it. Awesome stuff, this game tickles my brain I love it.
I get an error trying to run the game in-browser (Chrome):
Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.
Opening the iframe URL directly, however, appears to work:
https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/4697376/ghost%20monster%2004/index.html
Do you have 3rd-party cookies blocked? I had a similar problem in my own game, and maybe it's the same thing:
"if you block third-party cookies in Chrome, HTML5 games hosted on itch.io are denied access to LocalStorage and SessionStorage, even though it still works if you're testing using localhost, or on your own website." [dev log]
Other player workarounds: Unblock 3p cookies, or play the game in the itch.io app.
As a developer, I had to work around it by wrapping localStorage and sessionStorage access in try/catch blocks. I don't know if there's another way to detect that condition.
It took me quite a while to work out what was going on, and I still may not have grasped it completely...
...the colours vs. ghosts I did not get until I read the text (and obviously I didn't read the text at first). I like the idea but I think it needs signalling more, maybe have vulnerable ghosts flashing, or greyed, or something?) Also the "teeth" ghost is a bit mixed in its colouration and that confused me at times.
The teleporting around I still haven't completely worked out, is it just a way of respawning, or do some things that just teleport you? For a long time I thought the wheels were teleporters, but how I am thinking they are just monsters? This illusion (if correct) may be contributed to by I think there is a bug where occasionally I can be the right colour and still die (or at least teleport) when I hit a ghost.
Not sure what the flames are, are they ghosts in the process of respawning?
One feature of the original is that you cannot stop, I wondered whether you should also have that, but I think maybe with the arbitrarily complex mazes we need this additional option.
One feature I noticed about the mazes is that any area with limited exits is scary to enter when there are multiple ghosts around, so it would be an idea if you could guarantee that the level had a mix of scary and less scary areas (e.g. the sort of thing a human designer would intuitively do). You might be able to do that by making the maze generator start with larger rectangles (with a difficulty assigned to them) and recurse to filling in the final detail...
I wonder if a sequence of levels, where the difficulty and size vary as you progress would add a lot to the experience, e.g. give a clear sense of progressing and mix-up the experience with a bit of variety...
Love the look of it! Random gen is great and the color matching is a nice twist on the standard Pac-Man formula.
It's really challenging, which is cool, but sometimes feels a bit unfair. The main culprit of this feeling (I think) is the tendency for chasing ghosts to clump up next to each other. If the ghosts are the same color, it's no biggie—if they're different colors, then becomes a problem.
Some "personal space" logic that prevents them from getting too close to each other would help. Another option would be to subtly differentiate the pathfinding algorithm of one color from another. IE: if choosing between two directions where each direction is equally fast, blue always goes left and red always goes right. Could also do something as simple as make it so a chasing ghost has a % chance to take a sub optimal turn at any intersection.
Looking forward to seeing the next release!
Different pathfinding algorithms is how ghosts in Pac-Man work too.