The Rants of an Angry Game Dev Girl: The Making of PAC-MAN the Board Game

That's right gamers your favourite arcade game, PAC-MAN, has been made into a board game!! Perfect for family game night or killing time at the cottage.

Now you probably are all wondering what on earth I'm talking about and how this relates to the awesomeness known as PAC-MAN. Well this week in class, along with getting smoked by our infamous green discussion ball and having someone be very very rude to me for no reason, we were asked by our professor to create a board game based on a retro arcade video game. Now for anyone who is too young to truly know what an arcade is (No guys I'm not talking about your fancy playdium (Info on it HERE) or movie theatre arcades that have games like Dance Dance Revolution or DJMax Technika which are both very amazing games in their own right, i love them, I truely do, but I'm talking about the old, original arcades that included but are not limited to games such as Space Invaders, Frogger, Donkey Kong, PAC-MAN, among others).

Now since the girls of game dev never get to work with each other unless we are working in a large group on an assignment/studying for an exam or are in the same Game Development group, we never get to work together, so we quickly decided to form a group to tackle the task our professor gave us, with I believe we had half an hour to complete. We ended up choosing PAC-MAN since it was a game all of us have played (still play for some of us) for our game board.

Now for anyone who has never played or heard of Pac-Man (get out right now and play that game because it is unnatural for anyone to have never played Pac-Man. You can play it HERE ) I'll provide a quick overview of the game and it's history.

PAC-MAN

Pac-Man is an arcade game developed by Namco in 1980 and is considered one of the classics of Arcade games and an icon of 1980s pop culture. When Pac-Man created a new genre of games (which appealed to both genders especially with the release of Mrs. Pac-Man), since at the time the majority of games were Space Shooters, such as Space Invaders and Asteroids, and Sports Games, such as Pong. It is credited as being a landmark game in video game history, is among the most famous arcade game of all time, and it is also one of the longest running video game franchises from the golden age of arcade video games (you can find out more about the golden age of video arcade games HERE).

OUR GAME:

Now to stay true to the essence that is Pac-Man the girls of Game Dev originally wanted to make something were the players play as the infamous Pac-man, who being chased by those mean little ghosts while he is trying to collect his points. Unfortunately all our ideas always ended up having some sort of flaw that prevented them from being fun, plausible games.

One of the ideas we had was to actually have the players play as both Pac-Man and those sneaky little ghost (Trust me they are sneaky little creatures that will get you when you least expect it) at the same time. The idea was that a player during his turn would move as Pac-Man and the other players would then move as ghosts before moving on to the next player's turn. The goal of the game would have been to be the first player to collect all the cherries first. The board would have operated kinda of like the game trouble in regards to how you would move throughout the different levels of the board (there would have bee multiple levels which would look like squares within a square) since you have to pass your starting point (everyone would have their own) in order move on to the next section of the board.

While we really liked this idea we didn't end up using it because in the time frame we were given couldn't figure out and decide how the game play would work along with the rules and some of the mechanics. While we were trying to figure it out our idea ended up getting really complicated and messy so we ended up scraping the idea (which I'm a little sad about since I really liked our original idea) and changed it to a Race to the End type of game.

Basically the players all play as different coloured Pac-Man who are racing to the finish line, while avoiding the ghosts (which were represented as ghost panels) and picking up cherries (which were represented by cherry panels). While it is a working and playable game (which I don't mind since I kinda like it) I wish we were able to figure out how our original idea would work since it could have been interesting to see this to its full potential rather than taking the easier way out.

Here is what our game ended up looking like: