Machinations - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 102

(the green dotted lines): to a drain that drains a life, to a resource connection that
returns the ghosts from the maze to their house, and to a drain that drains all the
built-up threat.

FIGURe 5.27
reset when caught

T IP note the label
reading >100 on the
state connection to
the reset gate. This
indicates that the state
connection is an activa-
tor. activators connect
two nodes. The first
node activates the
second node when the
condition is met, which,
in this case, is when the
Threat pool contains
more than 100 threat
resources.

Power Pills
The last mechanism to be added to the diagram is the mechanism that allows play-
ers to eat the ghosts by eating power pills. Figure 5.28 adds this mechanism (light
blue) to the diagram and represents the full game. Power pills start as a limited sup-
ply. The player can choose to use them by clicking the Eat Power Pill converter to
convert a power pill into power-up time, an abstract resource that is automatically
drained. While some power-up time remains, the ghosts stop producing threat,
and a drain on the threat is activated. At the same time, a new action to eat a ghost
becomes available. Eating ghosts returns a ghost to the ghost house and also pro-
duces five bonus points.

NOTE Because we
don't simulate the
layout of the maze, we
arbitrarily assigned
a value of 100 to the
threat level to deter-
mine when the player
is caught by a ghost.
But as in the real game,
the player can evade
(using the interactive
evade gate), which low-
ers the threat.

The Complete Diagram
Figure 5.28 represents a playable approximation of Pac-Man. As we have said,
certain mechanisms have been omitted, and the game is different in various details.
It is possible to add these details to a Machinations diagram, but you would be
unlikely to learn anything new from them. However, you can discover a few impor-
tant things from studying even this simplified diagram. For one thing, players of
Pac-Man must balance their activities among different tasks: eating dots, evading