Pacman-style games in Director

February 29, 2000
by Mika Tuupola

tile graphics by Kelta

A Pacman style game was one of the first thing I did when I started to learn Director. The version was 6.5. Soon Macromedia introduced Director 7 and I switched to it. Since Lingo with the new dot syntax looked more like a real programming language I rewrote a new version of the game for this article.

This article does not give you a finished game. The source is a simplified version of the game. That means all the fine tuning was left out (effects, powerups, score system etc.) so you have some brainwork to do yourself. I will try the explain all the theory and logic behind my approach. While you read this it is a good idea to open the source code of the example movie to find out how all of this was implemented. Code should be well commented.

When reading the code please note that all the globals start with a letter "g" and properties with letter "p". For example gfoo or pbar.

Originally coming from a Unix administration / programming background, Mika currently works as a technical designer for Taivas HEL Oy, located in Helsinki, Finland. HEL's clients include MTV Europe, Diesel s.p.a., Sprite and Radiolinja (a major Finnish telecom operator). They are also known for HEL13, their own design magazine.