Maze Maker — Create, Play, And Edit Your Very Own Mouse Mazes!

johnr wrote:Most games (including maze games) are produced in Presentation mode and played in Play mode.

This one is produced and played in Play mode.

Yes.  Yes 'tis!  It's part of our "Thirteenth-Generation-Slide-Show-Games"-lineup.  These titles are all editable whilst run in Slideshow Mode, with their changes appearing in real or near-real time!

Here are some of my thoughts on playing this:
- It's a lot of work. I counted 32 x 18 = 576 squares. It's 1 click for a green square and 3 for a red. Overall it's a lot of clicking to make a maze.

Yeah, but I wanted the highest inch-based resolution possible, to add at-least a minor amount of difficulty, especially for folks like myself, with very shaky paws. 

Also, the "lot of clicking" was not how I'd intended the game's "code" to work, as somehow, the game's AI (Artificial-Intelligence) got reordered when I duplicated the original programming to finish the designing-grid.  You'll notice the order in which I'd first programmed the cell-behaviour below.

- If I stick it out to the end, I have a maze that I know exactly the winning route of, because I made it.

A-heh-heh?  I love that!  ¡lol!

- Because the size of the squares are quite large, it's not too difficult to avoid the red walls.

Unless you're me, and have 25PPI eyesight.

- I had the idea of having multiple green squares (say 20) and set the task of having to navigate the maze and click all of them within a time limit to win. I started to do this but realised that as soon as I mouse-overed the first green square I'd go to the 'You Win' slide. (Maybe you could drop this 'win' hyperlink and just have a winning sound effect when hitting a green square as an optional way of playing?)

I could potentially do that, but it would definitely take some extra time, as I'd have to change the programming for all five-hundred-and-seventy-five lime-coloured cells.  Certainly easy to do if I just spend two days creating a second gameplay-mode though.

The other thing I found intriguing was the little amber 'Start' square. I'll need to work out how this works and shifts you from designing in Play mode to playing in Play mode (unless this is a little secret you'd like to share?!)

Yes!  Yes!  Yes!  I finally did something in PowerPoint that you couldn't quite figure-out on the first try!

But okay, I'll tell you…

1. The whole editor's grid consists of four stacked layers of cells: the backmost invisible, the back-middle red, the front-middle lime-green, and the frontmost invisible.

2. I created and named one of each of these cells.

3. I applied disappear-animations so that, by default, only the back invisible squares would be present when the game was loaded. 

4. I then applied animation-triggers:

4A. Click the backmost cell, a red one and the cell-toggler appears.

4B. Click what looks like a red cell but is actually the cell-toggler atop it, a green one appears and the red one vanishes.

4C. Click the cell toggler atop a green cell, both the green cell and the cell-toggler vanish, leaving the back invisible red-cell summoner.

4D. Click the "Start"-button once, both the front and back invisible cells disappear, leaving only red and green.

4E. Click the "Start"-button aGain, the front and back invisible cells return, preventing you from accessing red's and green's hyperlinks.

4F. Due to the way PowerPoint naturally works, the "Start"-button will automatically toggle each time it's clicked, because all the animations it controls are set to "With Previous", except for the first one in each toggle-ProCess, which is instead set to "On Click" of the "Start"-button.  So there are only two "On Clicks" in that whole toggle sequence, as expected from a two-way-toggle.

5. I then just duplicated the original cells, and used PowerPoint's Grid-feature to help me visually with aligning them properly.

6. Once the cells were duplicated, I just made sure that all the relevant front and back invisible cell appearances and disappearances that had spawned from the duping of the original four cells were triggered by the "Start"-button, in the manner I mentioned above.

Kudos to you for aiming for a 'simple' approach. I think this shows that the gameplay can be relatively simple, but with advanced production skills being evidenced. What we have suggested before was about keeping focused on the gameplay and the person playing the game and not to add superfluous features that do not really contribute to playing the game.

This is a good step in the right direction, and this is a game with more potential for development I think.

johnr wrote:Finally, you have intrigued me once again with talk of 'Artificial Intelligence' used in this game (?!) and 'Nintendo-level compression'. More info??!!