pacmen - a GPL-licensed 2D arcade game written in Java

About || Download || Help || Media || Mapping || Contact

About

This is the project site of pacmen, a clone of the great 2D arcade game pac-man. Pacmen is in a very early state of development. You should check back later if you wanna have fun while playing it. ;)

Updates

You can track our subversion commits via our pacmen_svn Twitter account.

Download, Code & License

Pacmen runs under Linux, Windows, MacOS and many other platforms as long as you have Java installed (see Installing below). Pacmen is released under the GPL v2 license and comes WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.


Getting the game:

You can already get very early test builds here. They may or may not work, please don't contact us if they don't.



Getting the source code:

The code for a release is always available in the source code download section. Note that the contents of the 'pacmen-src.zip' archive is a NetBeans project, btw.

The latest development version of the code is managed in our subversion repository.

Installing and running pacmen

Pacmen is written in Java and should run on any platform that supports the Java Runtime Environment (JRE v1.6). This includes Linux, MacOS and Windows. You obviously need to have the free JRE installed. Then you can install pacmen:

Installation:

Unzip the archive you downloaded and place the pacmen directory it contains whereever you want to store the game. We'll call this place $pacmen from now on. Now run the install script for your OS (see the directory $pacmen/install/) to install. WARNING: Pacmen will NOT work if you fail to run the install script!


Running the game:

Run the start script for your OS (e.g. $pacmen/run_pacmen_windows.cmd) to play.

See the file $pacmen/documentation/pacmen_readme.txt for more info.

Documentation

Documentation is included in the release. See the documentation/ subdirectory of your pacmen directory.

Screenshots and videos

You can find more early screenshots here. We also have some very simple pacmen videos here.

Credits

Pacmen uses free music. All music is stored under the gamedata/sounds/music/ directory. The track default.mp3 by The Davotron is called Electridi and is the first song from the album Attack of the Davotron - Soundtrack. The song is licensed under the GPL.

This game also uses the JLayer real-time MP3 decoder library to play mp3 audio files. JLayer is licensed under the LGPL and stored in the file lib/jl1.0.1.jar under the pacmen directory.

Pacmen is made using some great open source tools including NetBeans, subversion and the GIMP.

Making levels and themes

Don't do that atm as the file structures may still change (which would render your stuff useless).

The pacmen gamedata is stored in the gamedata/ directory. Levels are simple ASCII files stored in gamedata/levels/and you should be able to create you own levels with a text editor easily. No need to do that though, a level editor comes with pacmen (you can start it from the menu). You can create a campaign from your maps easily using a text editor, just check our files in gamedata/campaigns/. The themes are simple png images, open them in GIMP and you'll get the structure. Just drop new themes into gamedata/themes/ and make your maps use them via the metadata section of the map (the number at the end of theme files specifies the size of a level field in pixels).

More info on this can be found in the development/ directory.

Reporting bugs or security issues, requesting features, ...

Please do NOT contact us about such things atm. We know everything is broken.

The Pacmen Team / Contact

Pacmen is currently developed by spirit and henneck. Please contact spirit if you have any questions or comments on this project.