RCWeb Pacman Party
Pacman Party is a shared-screen maze chase for RCWeb where every phone that joins becomes its own chomper on the same board. One display shows the maze, dots, power pellets, ghosts, and scoreboard, while each player steers from their phone and tries to outlast the ghosts while helping clear the room's shared dot field.
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The Game
Pacman Party turns a classic maze game into a room-sized scramble. Multiple players move through the same maze at once, collecting dots from a shared board and competing for score while also helping the whole room push the level forward. The ghost team is controlled by the display, so everyone plays against the same moving threat.
Normal dots add 10 points, power pellets add 50 points, and frightened ghosts are worth 200 points when eaten. Power pellets flip the ghosts into frightened mode for a short time, giving the room a brief chance to turn the chase around.
Each player has 3 lives in the current cycle. Getting caught costs a life and triggers a short respawn. If a player runs out, their life count resets and their score takes a penalty, so the session keeps moving instead of dropping people out permanently. When all dots are cleared, the level resets and the room continues into the next maze cycle.
How To Play
Open /pacman/ on the shared screen. Players scan the QR code to open /pacman-control/ on their phones in the same room. Use the direction buttons on the controller to steer through the maze.
Your character keeps moving in the chosen direction until you send a new turn, which gives the controls that classic Pacman-style feel. Grab dots, hit power pellets at the right moment, and use frightened mode to catch ghosts before they recover.
The maze progress is shared across the room, so every dot another player eats is one less remaining on the board. That makes the game partly competitive and partly cooperative: you are chasing your own score, but everyone is also helping clear the level together.
Controllers that stop checking in are removed from the live scoreboard automatically, and players can rejoin the room from their phones and drop back into the maze.
Powered By RCWeb
Pacman Party uses RCWeb's room-based WebSocket layer to coordinate one maze display with many phone controllers. The display and all phones join the same RCWeb room using the rc values injected by the Java server. The display publishes a QR code with the room already selected, so new players can jump directly into the current maze.
The display owns the live maze state. It tracks players, ghosts, dots, power pellets, frightened mode, respawns, level clears, score updates, and stale-controller pruning. Because the display is the single source of truth, everyone sees the same shared dot progress, the same ghost behavior, and the same power-pellet timing.
Phones communicate with the display through comms.js and RCWeb function calls. A controller registers into the room, sends direction changes, and receives updates for score, lives, level, active direction, dot progress, and status pulses such as joining, respawning, or level clear. The result feels like a social arcade maze board, but it runs on RCWeb's lightweight Java backend and vanilla browser apps.