Pacman

Controls:

arrows keys - movement

s - start game

p - pause game

r - resume game

shift+r - restart game

Balancing:

Score

To account for how fast pacman can move and easily get the outer pellets at the beginning of the game, the scores were adjusted as follows

    - Lowered the points per pellet to 50

    - Upped the points lost on ghost hit to -1000

AI 

When determining AI movement, the distance between pacman and the ghost is calculated for each component.

Two metrics were added to the ghost AI based on this result.

- Direct Movement

This means moving on the axis of the largest component difference eg component difference (0.1, 0.5) the AI will choose to move along the Y axis

- Correct Direction

Once the axis is determined, the correct direction will decide whether the AI will move towards or away from pacman.

Each ghost has a probability of moving directly towards pacman and a probability of moving in the correct direction. The red ghost is more aggressive while the blue ghost is more aimless

Additional features:

- On a ghost hit, the game pauses for a brief moment before the ghost position is reset to emphasize impact

- When pacman consumes the special pellet, pacman shines between red green and blue by implementing a simple timer that updates the color uniforms in pacman's vertex shader

- When the score increases, the score briefly turns green; if it decreases it briefly turns red

- The special pellet is placed randomly within the maze at the start of every game