Location: The Maintenance Maze - Sketch

He everyone!

Besides just working on the very next update, I also continuously work on ideas for future updates.

Every time I have an interesting idea, I’ll write it down in my notebook. And over time, when I have enough connecting ideas, I’ll type everything up in a readable way.  And that’s usually all I do, until I actually start working on that story.

But  lately I’ve been working on a story idea, that’s all based around the idea of Keen entering a maze. And because I was unsure if it would all work, I felt like I should make a prototype of this scenario to figure things out.  And so I made a maze :)

Now for this, I started by studying some of the classic maze-games.  And then I made a rough sketch, to figure out what ‘parts’ I would need to make for my maze. You know, like a straight part, a turn, a dead end, etc.

Now it turned out, that making a maze isn’t super difficult by itself. But there were some things to think about. Like...  what to do, if the player turns around. Do you just show the previous screen you came from? Because that would probably give the feeling that you are walking backwards. So to figure it out, I wanted to visualize the situation.

This was the first version I made. 

Now, this did help me to see which parts I needed for the maze. But because these tunnels are completely symmetric here, it was still hard to give a sense of going forward or backward. So I started to detail a few of these tunnels, to see how that changed the feeling.

Now, I’m still testing this as I write this. But something I already liked, are the added doorframes in the foreground. It’s a separate part, that I can put over the screen when you just went through a door.

Oh, and perhaps for some context, this will be a spooky ‘Scooby Doo’-type story. And what you see above, are ‘maintenance tunnels’ which have been poorly  maintained by some cheaply bought ‘helping-hands’.

Well, that all I will about this story for now. But if you have some  thoughts on how to make a good maze, then please let me know what to do :)

All the best & I wish you merry X-mas!

-Robin