Pakupaku is, quite unabashedly, our own version of Pac-Man. Consider it a tribute, a "creative reinterpretation", or whatever verbage works best at preventing Cease and Desist letters from flooding our mailboxes.

This game exists for fun. It is free to download and play, the source code is published, and anyone can contribute to its development.

You should probably get the latest version of Java before playing Pakupaku.

The current version is .01a - that's my way of saying all the bare essentials of the game are in place, but it's far from being suitable for release. It's "playable" in the sense that you can start the game and interact with it, but there's not much more to it than that. The 'a' indicates alpha mode, or internal testing and development. Eventually, it'll change to 'b', indicating beta mode, which is when we'll encourage the general public to play the game and give us feedback on it, while we put the last few pieces into place. Finally, the silly little letters will go away and we'll have version 1.0, the gaming equivalent of ringing the dinner bell.

As it stands, running the game will pop up a familiar-looking interface. Maze, pellets, ghosts, and all that. You control the yellow ball using the arrow keys on your keyboard. You can also stop moving by using the spacebar, but that's not likely to be true in later versions.

Although there is no scoring or even any way for the game to end in this version, you can still work on your skills by attempting the traditional task : clear all the pellets from the board without being touched by a ghost.

Pakupaku is in active development, and will be experiencing a number of changes over the next several months, not the least of which is creating some kind of inherent challenge in the game.

Some of the more interesting features to come are:

• More mazes - including the ability to create your own
• High scores - worldwide ranking
• Music and sound effects - including the ability to pick your own
• Network multiplayer - yes, you read that right
• Top secret stuff

Pakupaku was designed as part of a 2-month game creation challenge for the GeeQ Studios kickoff party in November of 2005. Version .01a was presented at the kickoff, and I somehow convinced the rest of the geeqs that it was a great and original idea, and deserved to be developed further. And so here we are.