The Maze

Recently I made a simple "Don't touch the wall with your cursor" game. I consider this a lesson in testing some of the things I learned through the Forum.

I ran into some complications with my project and hope that maybe someone can help me.

• The buzzer sounds even though the cursor is still a small distance away from the wall not touching it. Especially when turning corners. Is that a PowerPoint thing or MY PowerPoint thing? Or something else?
  
• When selecting "Again" at the end, on the second and consecutive runs slide timings and animations wouldn't work anymore. I inserted additional slides which transition automatically to the animated slides so the animations could work. Is that normal? 
  
• Instead of making the player start from the beginning each time a wall is touched, I would prefer to have 2 counters running: one incrementing each time a wall is touched, the other counting elapsed time. The target would then be to get as little as possible touches - ideally none - in the shortest time possible. Can it be done without VBA? If no, then does anyone have a macro or code snippet that would do the trick for me?
  

Thanks for any answers.

The .pptx file for download is here.

The only part of the mouse you need to be concerned about is the tip of the arrow. If that part touches a wall, then it would end your game or make a sound. The other parts of the mouse are OK to touch or overlap any obstacles.

When I get a moment I’ll download and take a look.

For bullet point 2...

If you start a slide with a 'With Previous' or 'After Previous' animation, and then return to it from a subsequent slide, the animation will not re-set. PowerPoint says: "It's done already!"

It's different if you start a slide with an 'On Click' animation. PowerPoint says: "Ok, click me again!"

I think it should be possible for this game to work on a single slide with 'Start' being visible from the beginning and the first object to click.

For bullet point 3...

I don't think it's possible to do these things without VBA. The closest I have got with a triggered game is to have a 'mouse over' transition to another slide when the wall is hit. The new slide says something like 'You have 4 chances left' then a link back to the maze slide. As the link is clicked, the text changes to 'You have 3 chances left' in readiness for the next hit of the wall. After the last chance, there is no link back!

I've had a go at a single slide version: The Maze - single You might find the use of 'Group 5' of interest. It's a shield to stop the maze being clicked before the Start button. It's 2 rectangles grouped and given No Outline and a Fill of 100% transparency (very different to 'No Fill'). It disappears when the Start Button is clicked and re-appears when the 'Again' button is clicked.

Shields like this are useful in many situations where there's something you don't want to be clicked until a certain time.

P.S. I really like the precise, mathematical, nature of your designs - like this maze and your kaleidoscopes.

I like this game!! the graphics are so good !! but i would suggest to add a "you lose" screen or "game over" screen  when you touch the wall specific no. of times. Cause you can just straight up go to the middle instead of finding the way.

Thanks for the input guys!

@johnr
I checked and learned a lot from your 1-slider - and to think I needed 5 slides for nearly identical output! Thanks! I have to learn to use 'shields' and more 'On click' animations. BTW - what's the practical difference between 'no fill' and 'transparency 100%" fill?

@rusnakcreative
1. it's a project in progress with more development in mind. Your observations for further refinement are true and taken . I intend to have more mazes varying in diffficulty; in time with obstacles, and clickable solutions (thanks again @johnr). Ultimately a true maze game. BTW Mike - have you ever heard of "Mazogs" for the Sinclair ZX (my first computer and game back in '81...)?
2. 'Touching the wall several times" means having a counter of sorts, because I wouldn't want to interrupt the game for the player by sending him to START each time. 
3. My simple formula wouldn't prevent players from going directly to the center through walls. They wouldn't win, though. One way of monitoring their actions would be by coupling the time counter with the touch counter. If someone reaches the center under X seconds with Y touches or less, means he had to go through walls. Longer times would consider less touches and quicker times more touches. So I'm back at square one with the counters.

The maze.
I drew the maze using lines - quick, easy and lots of control over the final appearance. Unfortunately once finished I found out PowerPoint doesn't allow to merge lines into a single shape. So I tediously redid the whole maze with tiny rectangles of different length plus triangles to fill in the most obvious gaps. Surely enough I chose a maze shape that doesn't have right angle intersections. If you enlarge the maze you can see that it's ugly especially at shape intersections - mismatches, little or no precision leading to different corridor widths, takes ages to draw, etc. etc. I'm not happy with the end result and I think I can do better.

Any ideas on how to draw a maze more effortlessly? 
Or maybe my concept of merging it into a single shape is wrong?

Regarding the 'Fill' issue - when you use 'No Fill', that's it - there's nothing there and nothing to click. It means that you could click on an object that's behind it if necessary.

With 100% transparency, there is a fill and therefore something to click, or something to prevent clicking an object behind it. You can imagine a shape with 50 - 60% transparency still being visible - this takes it further until it's invisible but it's still got a fill.

If the shield I put over the maze had 'No Fill' it would have made no difference at all. Try it.

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks John!

Regarding the 'Lines' issue - could you have selected them all (drag cursor over everything) and then Grouped them?

Or possibly, select them all and 'Cut > Paste as Picture'. This will allow you to re-size and keep all the line and gap proportions.

Grouping them yields same result as pasting as picture. 
PowerPoint responds immediately you touch the edge of the group/picture with no allowance to move through the corridors.

Yes, of course you're right.

I've done a bit of experimenting with Lines and Subtract Shape, but nothing useful has emerged I'm afraid. I'll see if I can think of anything else.

Mike may have some ideas.

You can select them all and then use the Union tool to merge them as one shape. The shape won’t act like a group, but a complex shape with many vertices. You can then right click on it to edit each vertex. This will also help you see if there’s anything weird going on with the shape, such as a small sliver where 2 points that shouldn’t be connected, are connected.

Unfortunately, the Union Tool doesn't work with lines.

How did you draw your lines in the beginning?

Just a thought but have you tried using the 'Freeform: Shape' drawing tool? 

You can draw straight lines by clicking, lifting your finger and moving the '+' by moving the mouse only, then click to change direction or... keep your finger down and draw curves or wiggles as you like. Then double-click to finish. You can then give the line a Weight of say 20pt via 'More Lines'. If a new line starts where one finished, there's no need to Group.

The double click "closes" the shape. PowerPoint sees as of then an additional invisible straight line joining the start and end positions of the shape causing mayhem for my purposes.

I've had that issue with the union and lines...   Instead of lines, a very small rectangle does work though...  I've substituted almost .05" height rectangles for lines in order to get the merge/union functions to work...  (Which reminds me, I've got a graphic work I have to do with Celebrity Sweepstakes later.. but the Chase gets my attention for now... darn TIMER!)

I used the approach I mentioned above to draw over some of your maze.

The blue lines 15pt:



I posted a link to a quick video of making lines like this just now - but it seems to have disappeared.

here it is again: Freeform: Shape - Lines

John, if you add an action to your shape, for instance "when mouse over play a sound" and you start moving your cursor through the corridors, you'll be surprised that it actually doesn't work as expected. It's the 'closing' of the shape I mentioned earlier.

Ah-Ha!  I think I've just seen what's happening here.

If I make a maze game like this, the lines I draw make up the path - not the walls.

I make a large rectangle (or hexagon or whatever) which can have a colour fill or be transparent and is set to make the sound when the cursor moves on it. You then 'send to back' so the pathway lines are on top of it. A small part of the pathway extends slightly outside of the rectangle, maybe with an oval start button over this to remove any 'shield' on click.

Got it.
Going further: if, simultaneously, you have moving objects in whatever way on the screen (not necessarily confined to the paths), what do you do to detect collision with the cursor (which has to be kept on the path)?