Making a Maze For Pacman (and his monsters)

Question

Hi. Im new to making games. Ive so far gone through a space Invaders tutorial and done an asteroids clone. I now want to improve my knowledge further so am thinking about doing a Pacman game.
However, I currently dont know how to go about making the maze, (which of course, restricts both the player and the monsters from crossing over the walls of this maze.)
Thanks in advance to any one who helps.
Andy

Answer 1

Hi
Ive created a game using tiles. However, My pacman currently doen't always stop properly at the walls. There seems to be two main problems.
a)Each tile is 16 pixels wide. Pacman moves 4 pixels each time. This means that
three quarters of the time, he's not properly in line with the corridor. However,
I think my program only checks whether the pixel at the top left of pacman is in
a tile that is not a wall. This means that pacman often can move half through a wall.
b) Using System.out.println, Ive noticed that when a button is held down (such as the left arrow key), System.out.println is activated once, then there is about half a seconds pause, and only then does System.out.println begin to constantly activate. It seems that during that half second break, the system isn't going through the bit of code that checks whether the tile is a wall or not (meaning he'll walk straight through the tile)
Here is some of my code...
   //When one of the arrow keys is pressed, a boolean is activated
   // and update speed is called
   public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) {
        switch (e.getKeyCode()) {
          case KeyEvent.VK_UP : up = true; break;
          case KeyEvent.VK_LEFT : left = true; break;
          case KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT : right = true; break;
          case KeyEvent.VK_DOWN : down = true;break;
        updateSpeed();
//Work out the x and y speeds (vx and vy)
//This is done by checking if the tile is a wall.
//The player speed is only maintained if it is not.
private void updateSpeed() {
        vx=0;vy=0;
        if (down){
             if (!Tiles.tileGrid[(y/tileSize)+1][x/tileSize])
                  vy = PLAYER_SPEED;
        if (up){
             if (!Tiles.tileGrid[(y/tileSize)-1][x/tileSize])
                     vy = -PLAYER_SPEED;
        if (left){
              if (!Tiles.tileGrid[y/tileSize][(x/tileSize)-1]){
                   vx = -PLAYER_SPEED;
                   System.out.println("yx" + y + " " +x);
         System.out.println("Grid" + (y/tileSize) + " " + (x/tileSize));}
        if (right){
             if (!Tiles.tileGrid[y/tileSize][(x/tileSize)+1])
                  vx = PLAYER_SPEED;
         System.out.println("yx" + y + " " +x);
         System.out.println("Grid" + (y/tileSize) + " " + (x/tileSize));
      }