Beat2R

Beat2R is a Pac-Man riff where the dots you collect are also the soundtrack you are mixing. The maze is the original Namco layout, the four ghosts behave the way they always have, and the win condition is still an empty board. The twist is that you are also armed, the score is also a song, and the pressure scales every wave.

Built for the Game-like Jam: Pac-Man.

What stays faithful

The maze is the 1980 Pac-Man layout, no shortcuts taken with the geometry. Movement is grid based with the familiar turn-on-intersection feel. The four ghosts run the classic archetypes, with Blinky chasing direct, Pinky cutting ahead, Inky flanking off a delay, and Clyde switching between commitment and wandering. Power pellets are still part of the board, lives and score still sit on the HUD, and clearing every dot is still how a wave ends.

The player sprite is a different lineage. The stance, the proportions, and the eight frame walk cycle are openly borrowed from Wizard of Wor, with the same planted footfalls and the same readable silhouette as it pivots between directions. It is the visual handshake that tells you this Pac-Man is also a shooter.

What pulls against it

The dots are not a single uniform crop. They come in four colors, each visually distinct, and each color belongs to one of the ghosts. Every dot you eat also belongs to one of four music stems, and the more of that color you sweep up, the louder and fuller that stem becomes in the mix. By the time the maze is nearly empty, the full track is playing, which is exactly when the ghosts are at their meanest.

Each color also defines a region of the maze, the patch of board its ghost considers home. As that region empties, the ghost tied to it grows faster and harder to put down, and once only a handful of its dots remain it turns outright invulnerable. Clear the region completely and the ghost is taken out of the fight, locked back into the central cage for the rest of the wave. So every color you commit to is both a track you are thickening and a ghost you are pushing into its meanest stretch before you can finally cage it. Difficulty scales wave to wave on top of all this: faster ghosts, more aggression, enrage timers that change how much room you have to breathe.

The power pellets no longer make you invincible. They give you ammo for a sonic wave you fire in the direction you are facing. The projectile is slow on purpose, so landing a shot means reading a ghost's path and timing the lead. A hit sends the ghost back home rather than killing it. Ammo is scarce, every shot is a choice between buying space now and saving it for when a corner gets ugly.

Instead of holding the whole board at once, the camera stays close on the player and pans smoothly as you move, so the maze unfolds around you rather than sitting flat on the screen. The left and right edges of the maze are stitched together, so walking off one side brings you straight back in on the other. The classic Pac-Man side tunnel is no longer a single escape route, the entire row works like a loop, and chases bend around the world instead of dead ending.

The result is two games layered on the same board. One is the cold routing puzzle Pac-Man has always been. The other is a twitchy performance where the soundtrack swells in lockstep with the threat.

Controls

• Move: WASD, arrow keys, or gamepad d-pad and left stick
• Shoot sonic wave: Space, or the A button on a gamepad

Credits

• Design, code, music: Andrea D'Amico (kc00l @ Fifth Layer Studio)
• Engine: DragonRuby GTK
• Reference: The Pac-Man Dossier by Jamey Pittman
• Inspired by Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) and Wizard of Wor (Midway, 1980)
• Made for the Game-like Jam: Pac-Man