Pac-Man Expression Driven Animation

This post is perhaps more technical than artistic but I wanted to share how I setup this animation where Pac-Man eats the coins based on expressions rather than manually animating them off. I did this so I could easily vary the pace at which Pac-Man moved without having to retime all the coins' exits (because I knew there might be changes). This was especially helpful on some of the scenes with larger maze configurations. It did get slow with lots of coins and the further you went in the timeline because the expression is calculating the "collision" with Pac-Man for every frame before it (since After Effects doesn't store global variables in any kind of memory) but it still beat the alternative. Basically, I worked hard coming up with the "rig" so I could be lazy. That's what you call working smart, right?

Project file is attached. Take a looks through if you'd like!