Minotaur Maze

After two weeks of bashing out code pretty much continuously and adding more features then I originally was intending for the initial release. We can finally say WE HAVE A GAME FINISHED! We’re happy to announce a spin off of our intended title, “Minotaur Maze” which we will be entering into the Unity3d Flash Competition. Hopefully, it’s a winner : )

Find the key, escape the Maze and try not to get smashed by the Minotaur. Every maze is unique, from the small to large, and we guarantee you, you will get lost! It’s up to you to locate the key and find your way to the exit. Attempt the Epic Maze if you dare, no really… we dare you!

*phew*

The last few weeks has been nothing but a technical challenge to convert what was pretty much just a procedural maze generator, into a procedural maze generator with a Minotaur in flash without exploding. So every dynamically generated object to do with Maze Generation and AI was turned into pooled memory. Every large prefab containing data had to be embedded in the scene and handled differently. Different input methods had to be defined, simply cause Flash doesn’t yet allow you to lock cursor to the screen (who wants to play a game that you have to move the mouse around the outside of the game to the opposite side, just to make your turn left or right). Pretty much everything in code had to be flattened, no recursion. Memory had to be recycled at run-time. And art had to be mostly finished… for a change <_<“.

Elise added some additional art to the game as well and couldn’t of been finished without her help.

A few of the features that we originally had, had to be turned off, like Jumping and Pits. For some reason the flash version just doesn’t let you jump or even look up and down for that matter. Which we’re a little saddened about as it added that little bit of extra peril for the player to fall into. The Minotaur’s “find the player” feature was also disabled, in most cases it just made it more dumber then running into a wall. Hopefully in a future release it’ll be turned back on and not as clumsy. The map generation was also turned off, mainly because we don’t think code generated textures is something fully supported in Unity Flash.

This was certainly one of the most challenging, fun and tiring two weeks ever. Considering that the weather has been in the high 30Cs, and low 40Cs as of late. We’ve literally burnt ourselves out in more ways the one. We’ve earned a much needed break considering today is going to be another one of those 30Cs days.

We want to also thank Adam Taylor, for helping us get to where we are, without his relentless support we just couldn’t of done it. And a special thanks to Joe, for simply saying three syllables that made the game that much more awesome, “Min-o-taur”.

Until next entry, we hope everyone had an awesome Christmas, Happy New Year and if in Australia Melbourne, has found a nice place to keep cool.

Now, we can finally play all those Steam games we bought over the Steam holiday. Oh… wait… homework… …NOOOOOOoooooo!!! T_T