For Halloween I made a game. It was supposed to be a small, simple text-adventure, but it evolved a bit into a deeper mystery. As a mystery, I shan't spoil it, so if you haven't played it yet, click here.
Now, for the spoiling....
The Maze is a game about just that, a maze. It's a disorienting and mysterious text-adventure that leads players through twists and turns and occasionally helps them reach the ultimate goal, the center. The player starts somewhere in the middle of the maze and is given options of what to do, consisting generally of Exits to move through and Objects to interact with.
More than any other game I've made, this game required constant thinking about balance. Initially the maze was empty, and as I filled it up with more stuff, I was constantly having to consider the implications each new thing would have on the overall balance of the game. My overall goal was to ensure it was a fun, quick game where players could always find the center if they tried hard enough, but without making that too arduous or long of a journey. At the same time, with the game being relatively simple, I had to keep it from being too easy. In the end part of the difficulty is simply the unknown mechanics, part is the game trying to hinder your progress.
An example of this give-and-take is is fog. When the player approaches the center, they start becoming aware that they are entering a fog. They aren't told this explicitly, but they probably correctly assume the fog's thickness is related to their distance to the center. Part of the difficulty added was that the player isn't told what the fog means. Part of it is that the fog isn't exact nor always correct (it's implemented lazily, leading to literal corner-cases). Partly it's the language used to convey how thick the fog is, which isn't explicit. All of these things combine into what's hopefully a useful tool to guide players, in addition to the other clues in the maze. The idea is that the fog alone probably isn't enough, even if you know exactly how it works, but in concert with other clues, you should have enough needles pointing you in the right direction.
As usual, I really enjoyed this fun challenge, even though it went way over the tiny-game-status that it was intended to be. If you want to see the code, it's one right-click away, or here. That's all for me today!
Happy Hacking!
- Chris