Pellets

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One thing that we all know about Pacman is that he eats a lot of pellets. Pellets are placed throughout the maze and it's Pacman's primary purpose in life to eat all of the pellets. In fact, that's the only way we know that the player completed a level. Once all of the pellets are gone, then the level is over and we can move on to the next level. There are also 4 big power pellets at each of the four corners of the maze. If Pacman eats one of these power pellets then the ghosts become vulnerable and Pacman can eat the ghosts. Right now let's just worry about how to get the pellets in the maze to begin with.

If you were to count up all of the power pellets in the original Pacman game, then there would be a total of 244 pellets. 240 of those pellets are regular pellets and are worth 10 points each. The other 4 pellets are the power pellets and are worth 50 points each. So just by finishing the level you'll get 2600 points. That's the minimum number of points you'll receive for just finishing a level.

If you were to also look at the original Pacman game, you'll notice that all of the paths don't have pellets. Some paths, like the paths surrounding the ghost home, don't have any power pellets. So we can't tell the game to fill any empty spot with pellets.  I mean you could, an easy way to fill in the pellets would be to say wherever there's a '+' or a '.' symbol place a pellet there as well.  But we need to be able to say where the power pellets go as well.  And like I said before, maybe we don't want to place pellets everywhere.  Here's what we'll do:

• Anywhere there's a '.' or a '+', place a pellet.
• Anywhere there's a 'p', place a power pellet
• Anywhere there's a 'P', place a power pellet

The difference between 'p' and 'P' is that 'p' is placed on a path and 'P' is placed on a node.  Seems simple enough right?  But now we'll need other symbols that also represent nodes and paths other than '+' and '.' since we're not placing pellets everywhere.  Here's what we'll do:

1. Anywhere there's a '+', 'P', 'n', place a node
2. Anywhere there's a '.', '-', '|', 'p', place a path.

So let's create modify our maze1.txt file and place the pellets into this file.

We are going to create three new classes that deal with the pellets: Pellet, PowerPellet, and PelletGroup. Create a new file called pellets.py.

The Pellet class really doesn't do a whole lot.  A pellet is just a white circle that has a radius of 4 pixels.  We also specify how many points a pellet is worth:  10 points.  The visible variable just allows us to hide a pellet if we want.

The render method is the same as Pacman's render method, but we only draw it if the pellet is visible.  When will we ever make the pellet not visible?  Let's talk about the Power Pellet next.