Pac-Man

A Pac-Man arcade clone built with Charming, showing what the framework looks like when the “app” is a real-time game: a render loop driven by timers, a board that scales to your terminal, half-block sprite drawing, and SQLite-backed high scores. The source lives at pandorocks/pacman and it installs as the pacmanrb gem.

Run It

From RubyGems:

gem install pacmanrb
pacmanrb

Or from a source checkout:

git clone https://github.com/pandorocks/pacman
cd pacman
bundle install
bundle exec pacmanrb

How to Play

• Enter on the title screen starts a game.
• Steer with the arrow keys or WASD — turns are buffered and taken at the next opening, like the arcade.
• Eat every pellet to clear the level; levels get faster. Power pellets — drawn as cherries — frighten the ghosts so you can eat them for combo bonuses (200/400/800/1600); eaten ghosts race home as floating eyes.
• You have 3 lives. Game over shows the top-5 high score table, persisted in SQLite.
• r/Enter restarts from the game over screen; q quits anywhere; ctrl+p opens the command palette.

The four ghosts have distinct brains: one chases you, one ambushes four tiles ahead, one wanders randomly, one patrols its corner. They alternate between scatter and chase on a timer.

What It Demonstrates

• Game rules as plain Ruby — the arcade logic under lib/pacman/arcade/ has no TTY dependency, so the whole rule set is unit-tested headlessly.
• The Charming app layer — controllers, views, and components under app/ render the board and screens.
• Procedural sprites — at larger terminal sizes the actors are drawn as half-block sprites: Pac-Man is a circle whose mouth points where he’s headed, ghosts get their classic domed-and-scalloped shape.
• Selective persistence — live game state stays in memory per run; only high scores persist to the database.