Trail Blazers

Goal of the game: escape the maze in one minute

Controls: WASD or arrow keys to move

The top left corner of your screen shows the the distance to the exit.

The top right corner shows you the time remaining.

When you come across the path, a number will pop up showing the closest that that path got to the exit.
If the timer runs out, don't worry, you'll respawn at a random point in the same maze with another opportunity to make it out alive.

The original purpose of this game was to experiment with asynchronous multiplayer in which many players would collaborate in trying to escape a larger maze, leaving behind trails for other players or their future selves. I love the idea of a community of disparate people coming together to help everyone out of a crisis/enigma. As the end of the project came, that (and many other ambitious ideas / partially working pieces) was cut as I tried to pull together some sort of a semblance of gameplay from random bits of this or that. But if this is ever picked back up again, asynchronous multiplayer is high on the list of features to add back in.

This is a very, very rough prototype and is full of bugs and unimplemented features, so be warned. Known bugs include occasionally respawning outside of the maze. Feel free to restart or just walk away for a minute and you will hopefully respawn back in the maze. If you can't see the timer in windowed mode, try fullscreen. It definitely wasn't designed to work across all screens/resolutions...

If you're interested in maze generation, I highly recommend Jamis Buck's blog on maze generation algorithms. It provides a great introduction to the many different algorithms out there for generating mazes and I greatly enjoyed translating a straightforward algorithm from pseudocode to C#. http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/1/10/maze-generation-prim-s-algorithm

Credits:

Emily Adams - designer / coder / encourager - thanks for helping out!