Pac-Man

C implementation of Pac-Man using SDL2, with collision detection, ghost AI, random maze generation, and file-based map loading.

Systems Programming project completed during a course at
ENSEIRB-MATMECA, Bordeaux INP —
Telecommunications department, 2025/2026.

Features

• Smooth Pac-Man movement with buffered direction input
• Collision detection against maze walls (tile-based)
• Four ghosts with directional AI (chase / flee depending on vulnerability state)
• Pac-gum system — ghosts become vulnerable after every 30 pac-gums eaten
• Random maze generation via iterative DFS with backtracking
• File-based map loading (custom .txt format)
• Oriented Pac-Man and ghost sprites (up / down / left / right)
• Pause mode with mouse and Pac-Man coordinate overlay

Files

File	Description
main.c	Game loop, SDL event handling
algo.c / algo.h	Game state, collision detection, ghost & Pac-Man logic
affichage.c / affichage.h	SDL rendering (map, sprites, HUD)
generate_lab.c	Random maze generation (iterative DFS + stack)
Makefile	Build system
maps/	Example map files
images/	Sprite assets (PNG)

Usage

make
./pacman              # default built-in map
./pacman map.txt      # custom map file

Controls

Key	Action
↑ ↓ ← →	Move Pac-Man
P	Pause / unpause
R	Restart (after game over)
Q	Quit

Map format

Maps are plain text files where each character represents a tile:

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
WS                       W
W  WW WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW   W
W     G    G    G    G   W
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Character	Tile
W	Wall
	Path
S	Pac-Man start
G	Ghost start

Random maze generation

Mazes are generated with an iterative DFS (depth-first search with backtracking):

1. Mark the starting cell as visited and push it onto the stack
2. While the stack is not empty:
   • Pop the current cell
   • If it has unvisited neighbours: push it back, pick one at random, remove the wall between them, mark the neighbour visited and push it

A maze of cells_w × cells_h cells produces a (2·cells_w+1) × (2·cells_h+1) tile map.

srand(time(NULL));
create_map_txt("map.txt", 13, 14);  // → 27×29 tile map

Dependencies

• SDL2
• SDL2_image
• SDL2_ttf

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev

Reference

Pac-Man original game — Namco, 1980.
Maze generation — Maze generation algorithm, Wikipedia.