"PacMan - VENGEANCE" is a silly PacMan-inversion game I originally developed near the end of grad school as part of my demo portfolio while shopping around job applications. It's primary purpose is to showcase a hand-built engine I had grown over the years, Artemis. I used Artemis for a number of projects, from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) rocket design simulations to hobby games.

I recently revisited both Artemis and Vengeance and found, much to my surprise, that it didn't take a lot of effort to update them for SDL2 (and associated libraries). If you want to mess around with it, or just have fun with a little demo game (that got me through to the final round of interviews with a then-tiny studio in west LA called "Riot Games"), here's what you do.

First, you need to build the Artemis engine library. See the following repository for more details:

https://github.com/Tythos/ArtemisLib

Once this is done, you should have a collection of libraries. Artemis is statically linked, but you'll also want runtime (.DLL) files for the following dependencies, which should be copied to the "msvc" folder:

• glew32d.dll
• libpng16-16.dll (will originally be "libpng16.dll" when you build it, but requires some renaming... don't ask...)
• SDL2.dll
• SDL2_image.dll
• SDL2_mixer.dll
• SDL2_ttf.dll

To build the game itself, you can use the MSVC solution in the "msvc/Vengeance.sln" solution. You will need to point the project to the usual dependency paths for headers and static libraries, of course. But once it successfully builds, you should be able to debug (F5) straight out of the IDE.

Assuming all the paths and resources are configured, you should now see the game launch! See "help/hotkeys.txt" for a list of commands. The basic premise is this:

• You control the ghosts (one at first, more as you level up), who are trying to hunt down PacMan
• When PacMan eats a large dot, your ghosts will turn blue. While blue, PacMan will attempt to chase them down and eat them. Your ghosts can only eat PacMan when they are not blue.
• Mazes are randomly generated with each level, and grow in size.
• Successfully completing a maze will let you "level up" an ability of the ghosts you have so far "unlocked". Each ghost has a special ability that becomes more and more powerful as you level it up.
• When you have multiple ghosts, you can switch between them using the spacebar. This is really the core mechanic of the game: ghosts will continue moving in the direct you most recently commanded them, unless they run into a wall. So, switching between ghosts and "trapping" PacMan between them (with the help of their abilities) is key to hunting down PacMan as the maps grow.