Maze Eater
Four Pursuers, One Short Rule Each
You run a maze eating dots while four ghosts hunt you through it. Eat one of the four big dots, drawn here as fruit, and the ghosts turn blue for a few seconds, long enough to turn and eat them. Clear every dot and the next of three mazes comes up, with shorter blue spells as the levels go on.
Simple Rules, Complicated Behavior
None of the ghosts is clever. Each follows a short rule about which turn brings it closer to a target square, and the four targets differ: one aims at you, one aims at the square ahead of you, one aims at a point reflected through another ghost, and one breaks off whenever it gets close. Run those four small rules at once and the result looks like planned teamwork - pincer movements, ambushes, moments that read as hesitation. Nothing in the code coordinates anything. It is the same reason a flock has a shape no bird is holding in mind: behavior at the level of the group does not have to exist anywhere in the parts.
How to play
- Arrow keys steer and P pauses; you keep moving until a wall stops you.
- The side tunnels slow the ghosts to about half speed, but not you.
- Ghosts eaten on one big dot pay 200, 400, 800 and 1,600; you have three lives, and one more at 10,000.
- Watch the ghost heading for the square in front of you, not the one behind you.
