UniPac

Pac-Man for the terminal, in Rust.

Features

• Ghosts alternate between 'scatter' (each heads for its own corner) and 'chase' periods, each with its original targeting.
• Ghosts leave the ghost house as in the arcade game: each waits for a number of dots (a global count after a lost life), or for a timer if pacman stops eating.
• Ghosts flee pacman when frightened, and slow down in the tunnel and when frightened.
• When eaten, ghost eyes trace a path back to the ghost house.
• Two 'fruit' bonuses on every level.
• An intermission ('coffee break') after level 2: Blinky chases pacman, then a giant pacman chases a frightened Blinky.
• Cornering: steer early and pacman takes the first opening.
• Mazes: shortened pacman maze (24 rows), regular pacman maze (29 rows) and 4 Ms Pacman mazes (31 rows).

Pacman is animated with ASCII symbols, the ghosts and fruit with emoji (Pinky 👺, Blinky 👹, Inky 👻, Clyde 🎃 - Unicode has no ghost symbol). Emoji are two columns wide, so each maze tile is too.

Run

Needs Rust 1.88+ and a terminal with emoji support, at least 80 columns wide and 33 rows tall.

cargo install --git https://github.com/jesper-olsen/UniPac
unipac

Or from a clone: cargo run --release. --level N starts on level N: 1 is the shortened maze, 2 the regular one, 3-6 the Ms Pacman mazes.

On Debian/Ubuntu, building needs sudo apt install libasound2-dev libdbus-1-dev pkg-config. Sound is optional: without an audio device the game runs silent.

The high score is saved between runs, in ~/.local/share/unipac on Linux and ~/Library/Application Support/unipac on macOS.

Controls

Arrow keys to steer, space to pause, q or Esc to quit. Space or Enter skips an intermission.

Credits

• Steven Goodwin's C version of the game.
• Sound assets from Dale Harvey's JS version
• Marquee text by ChatGPT
• The Pac-Man Dossier
• Ms Pac-Man Walkthrough