PROGRAMMING PACMAN IN PYTHON

UPDATE:  I haven't updated this site in a long time, so the Pacman tutorial here is incomplete.  For a complete Pacman tutorial go to pacmancode.com.  That is my other website where I have dedicated the entire site to Pacman coding and is more complete.

This is my attempt to understand how to program Pacman.  The language that I am using is Python, however, I'm hoping that these instructions will be general enough that any language can be used.  I just want to get the logic and my thought process written down.  The reason I'm doing this is because all of my notes on this are scattered around and it would be useful to have them centralized.  This is mainly for me, but if it benefits anybody else then that would be great.  I'm not a programmer by trade, however, I use Python in my daily job.  Python is a great language to start with as it doesn't take a lot of code to get something running.  It's a high-level language which means it's more user-friendly, as opposed to languages like C++ which has a higher learning curve.  This doesn't make it a better or worse language than C++, all languages have their strengths and weaknesses.  Because I'm not a trained programmer I'm sure I will be committing many programming sins that will make anybody familiar with programming cringe.  I want to write the best and most efficient code that I can, but my primary goal is to get things working first.  In the end I hope to be a much better programmer than when I started.  

The outline of this project isn't set in stone and will probably change as I progress.  I tend to jump around a bit instead of working in a linear fashion.  

The following video is the complete game we'll be making.  As you can see, you can play as either Pacman or Ms. Pacman.  The levels are the same for both characters, so it's just a visual difference between the two.

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