Posts Tagged ‘Space Invaders’
Pac- man was created by Toru Itwani and licensed by Namco. The game was centered on an old Japanese folk tale.
The object of the game was simply to move through a maze, while gobbling the dots and avoiding ghosts. Pac Man was a tear away success spawning a cult in its wake.
It was picked up for production in the US by Midway.
Pac-man was a nice breakaway for gamers bored with an extreme dose of space invaders. The game soon went on to strip ‘Asteroids’ as the greatest selling game of all time.
Game play
The player maneuvers the protagonist through a maze eating dots. The game proceeds to the next level once all the dots are eaten.
There are four ghosts which roam around the maze trying to catch Pac-man who is the character maneuvered by the player. If the ghosts touch Pac-man, a life is lost.
The game ends when no lives remain.
At the corners of the maze there are four power ups. These power-ups render Pac-man a short-timed ability to gobble up the ghosts.
Once a ghost is eaten, it returns to the ghost pen where it is revived. The regeneration time for the ghosts shortens as the game advances through the stages.
Despite the seemingly randomness movement of the ghosts, their nature is strictly deterministic. This allows experienced players to devise precise patterns of movement that enables them to complete levels without being caught ever.
The simplicity of the game and the adrenaline rush it created, when a ghost came near transformed this game into an addiction. Unofficially, it is the most played game of all time.
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The first arcade games were built on discrete logic and were strictly based on competition between the players. Therefore, there wasn’t any A.I. system.
Heuristic algorithms have been used in the arcade games. The common method of controlling an NPC in the game was by scripting.
‘Path finding’ is another common A.I. system that has been used in the real time strategy games. ‘Path finding’ works by calculating how to get an NPC from one place to another after considering the terrain and obstacles.
Games like Quake and Pursuit based all the enemy actions on particular stored patterns. The space invaders further refined this movement, by adding in-game events which were dependent on the hash functions.
This resulted in more varied and complex enemy movements.
Pac-Man incorporated this technology, at the same time jazzing it up by providing different personalities for each ghosts.
Although the ghost movements in Pac-Man felt random, it was a cleverly scripted and well disguised action.
The 1990’s saw the emergence of finite state machines. The arcade racing games were powered by a ‘rubber banding’ A.I. system.
If the computer controlled the opponents “fall behind”, they received a superb boost allowing them to catch up.
The system too, works the other way around, enabling the human players to catch up if they fall behind. The arcade shooting games should ideally have a large rule base which is basically the list of NPC options like attack long range, call for help, flee etc.
The trick lies in using a random factor to choose from this base factor. This has displayed an enhanced feeling of intellect and developed the fun factor.
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