So much for my regular blogging habit.

Since my last post, I've been continuing my self-education in games development. I'm going to write about the state of my current project, which is a Pac-Man clone.

But first, briefly, some exciting personal news!

In March, 7 years after we starting going out, I proposed to my partner Lucy. And she said yes! We're getting married in October here in Melbourne.

We also went to Europe for a short holiday - one week in the UK catching up with relatives, then two weeks in a Parisian apartment. It was an amazing time - what an incredible city!

So, as is often the way with Life, I haven't been able to spend as much time as I expected on Pac-Man. Aside from the aforementioned events, it's still taken longer than expected.

There are a few reasons for this:

• As my understanding of the game evolved, I would think of different ways of doing things. This resulted in me reworking large chunks of code. This is really the whole point of the exercise: an opportunity to learn how a program like this hangs together.
• While fleshing out "secondary" parts of the game, I would realise that some earlier assumption I had made was no longer valid, and would have to do some rework. For example, when Pac-Man eats a ghost, everything pauses for about half a second. This meant implementing a global wait function. I could've glossed over these kinds of details, but I learned more by just spending the time and doing it.
• I decided to implement some rudimentary graphics and sound effects. This has been a lot of fun so far, and is a big part of why I'm excited by games development - lots of different creative techniques involved.
• The game logic is more complicated than I realised. Luckily, I could refer to The Pac-Man Dossier whenever I needed help - an excellent resource.

I'm not going to implement every last feature of the game, but I do still want to implement a couple more things. I think it's only the following:

• Background music. (In the original Pac-Man, this is a weird wobbling sound that speeds up towards the end of each level.)
• Artwork for the bonus symbols (cherry, key, etc).
• "Cruise Elroy" mode (see Pac-Man Dossier)
• Maze flashing on level-up

The code will be available on my GitHub account shortly. Once I publish it, I'll write a follow-up post detailing some of the interesting technicalities of my implementation.