Pac Man was just a game. Now this is real.

Dungeon Crawler Game Jam 2025

This project was supposed to be a Jam entry, but didn't finish in time.
But the milestone of being "Jam Complete" is still on the map.

Jam Theme: Genre-Mix. Dungeon Crawler and Pac Man.
Collect Tokens, evade or kill ghosts.

That idea is not an original one. It was taken from 3D Munch for the Oric Atmos.

How to Run the Game

Easiest way is to download the ZIP file and run the "start" file in the folder.

If you know your way around the C128, feel free the d64 or d81 disk-images. Both contain the same files. The d81 will have faster loading time because the 1581 was faster than the 1571 or 1541. Even in emulators, d81 images have faster loading times.

Gameplay

The goal of the game is to collect all gems (@ characters, for the time being) before the wandering ghosts kill you. The top row of the display shows the direction you're facing, the number of gems to collect, and your hitpoints.

Once you collected all gems, you need to go the exit. If you stumble across the exit, you'll see a message at the bottom that says "collect all gems first", or something like that.

Movement

Move with WASD and QE (for strafing).  Monsters move as fast as you do, but they can't strafe and they only walk in the direction they are facing. So you can cut corners to get an advantage over them.

Right now, only one ghost is implemented. It is always directly targetting the player's position.

Combat

Attack the enemy with F. Every blow hits. Ghosts can only attack when they are on a tile directly next to your position. Also, they need to be facing you.

You can also do ranged attacks. Ghosts and you have 3 hitpoints. Once ghosts are killed, they respawn at their fixed respawn-location. So, killing them is only a temporary solution.

Map

The map can be displayed by pressing M.
When showing the map, Ghosts do not advance.

Final status of the game

The ghost sprite is not rendering the facing direction of the ghost correctly currently.

No healing items, hitpoints are lost permanently.

Rendering of gems to collect and ghosts is still very limited.

Text display on bottom of the page is not used very much yet. Would be great for combat feedback or information about wandering ghosts.

Polishing. Lots of sprites are only placeholders. Also the wall tiles are only a very primitive set.

The Chicken

Hardware Requirements

This game is designed to run on the Commodore 128 (yes, in C128 mode), and is using the VDC-Chip (not the VIC-II chip, which is used in C64 mode). Also, the VDC-Chip needs to have 64kB of VRAM available.

Source Code

https://github.com/The8BitTheory/dungeoncrawlerjam2025

Resources

The font used in the game is this:
https://opengameart.org/content/monospace-bitmap-fonts-english-russian

References

How to create a Dungeon Crawler

The following playlist contains more related videos by The 8-Bit Theory:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLetZmJRkDZfWHAXL8JxHkswJ8E-LgkZud

The video that brought 3D Munch to my mind

Inspiration to look into Dungeon Crawlers (for german viewes)

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