All done! Already filled with lots of user submissions. I can already tell that making sure submissions work right is going to be murder. But we shall see! It’s pretty awesome already, with multi-part puzzles made by different people.

Play now: http://hamumu.com/maze.php

It requires a Dumb Account to play, but those are free and the most fun thing in the world, so you would be a fool to pass that up.

Well, I spent day 1 playing WoW, watching TV, and trying to come up with an idea with no success.  Now it’s day 2, and things are coming along really smoothly:

There’s more functionality done than you can see in the shot.  You can move around the (two-room at the moment) maze.  If there were items, you could use them, drop them, and combine them, but not pick them up yet.  So as you can see, there are doors leading off into space.  If you go that way, you actually stay in the room you’re in, but an edit section will pop up on the screen for the room you tried to enter.  I haven’t done that yet, but you’ll be able to make your own description and layout there.  Then that place is marked “pending” as it’s emailed to me for verification (to check for language and such).  Pending areas can’t be built in or entered, and there’s a “nifty” graphic indicating them.

This is going to be a sight to see!  I can see great potential for impassable situations, but that’s all theoretical right now.  If I didn’t include items and just had riddles, we’d be good, except for one thing - I just know shortly after startup, we’ll end up in a state where all possible paths are blocked off.  But I can always manually throw in doors if that happens.  I could just verify that there is always at least one door leading into the void, but that’d be a very heavy database churn to do.

This was my entry for Ludum Dare #7, which was the first LD I entered. The theme (growth) eventually gave me the idea of growing a maze.

So, you create the maze as you walk around inside it. When the game begins, the maze is just a set of disconnected squares. Each of these squares can be linked with a set number of its neighbours (how many depends on the square, from none to four), and you create new links by walking from one square to another where there’s no previous link. Once a link is created it can be walked on as much as you want, but a link can’t be removed once created, so you have to be careful when creating your maze so you don’t get stuck.

Once I had that working the deadline was looming close, so I threw in some keys and locks and made the objective to clear all locks of each level, to make the thing resemble an actual game. In the end there was four levels, a random level generator, and also a level editor.

I wrote in the original README that I’d continue to work on the game, something I haven’t done. I still like the general idea behind the game, but it has this tendency to degenerate into just staring at numbers, which isn’t very fun at all, and on top of that it’s easy to get stuck, having to restart the level if you don’t pay attention. Perhaps some of the extra elements I didn’t have time to put in the game for the compo — more tile types, powerups, bombs, enemies — would have made it better (more varied if nothing else), but I think the interface is the main problem. It should be more obvious what tiles can connect, how many exits are left, etc, so there’s less guesswork, no number tracing, just puzzle solving. Since the levels are so “dynamic” getting that to work would be tricky, though.

Download: [ Windows | Linux (x86) + source code ]