P1K-man

A Pico-8 game in 1024 bytes, created for Pico-1K Jam 2026 in 4 days.

Pico-8 Edu source code here.

Features:

• the crazy idea to replicate the original maze layout quite faithfully;
• the game starts with two ghosts and every level introduces a new baddie including an enemy pac-man and eyes-only (black) ghost after level 7;

What didn't make it in 1024 bytes:

• Big pills, you're destined to avoid them all the time;
• No sound effect (I didn't have room for a "Ready!" label, you can imagine for other assets...)

Game Controls

⬆️⬇️⬅️➡️ Move with arrow keys
❎ [X or V] Start a new game
[P or Enter] Pause Menu and options...

Making of

Burn a few bytes of the budget to have the following data in the main spritesheet:

The first three sprite tiles are for pacman in two directions (the mouth will be animated via palt and pal) and a basic ghost to recolour. The rest is line data (x1,y1,x2,y2) for the paths of the left half of the maze.

The approach to render the maze has been:

• extract lines data;
• mirror the second half of lines;
• render to 0x8000:
  • carve paths with thicker rrectfills (see animation below);
  • create final maze contour (basically a rounded outline of carved paths area);
  • draw actual thin lines to both have moving paths and dots to munch.

All actors move along the lines in the middle of each segment and only your pacman will eat the dots updating the secondary spritesheet.