PacMan Pixel Art

I know its been done to death, and I know the world could probably just get on by without another one; but I've decided to do it anyway. I'm making a PacMan clone. It's going to be Flash based but, with any luck, I'm going to try keeping the charm of the original version with some nice pixel art. The web versions I have seen so far seem to favour vector rendering of the maze and characters. This makes everything look really smooth and, to be honest, a little bit boring.


As you can see, I've already made a start on the artwork. If you're making your own version of this game and are looking for sprites then go ahead, take these. They were hand cranked pixel by pixel in Paint Shop Pro, and the logo was an old bitmap font I had sitting around. I didn't make the font myself and I'm afraid the PCX file didn't hold any info on who did.

And here is the classic PacMan maze.

I always mock up screen shots of the game I want to make before I start any code, that way I know what I'm making and it helps me avoid taking the little short cuts in a games development that have a cumulative effect in the end of making it all look crap.

I'll post some more info about this project once I have some code written. The AI is, from a programmers point of view, probably the most interesting thing about this game, and probably the reason it is cloned so often. I have a good idea about how I want to do this so I'll try and explain that another day.