A Maze Ball - Post Mortem

A Maze Ball is the first game I have ever made. It was made using Unity, Photoshop and SketchUp Pro. Great little game for a first attempt. It was made in roughly 60 hours total, with the help of a very dear friend of mine. That help was mostly in coding the game, all terrible design choices and over-the-top colour schemes were my idea and I take full responsibility for how awful it looks. Please be aware that the choices made on the aesthetics of the game were all design choices. This game is made to be awful in just about every way. Having said that, it's still pretty fun.

The concept started out pretty simple. It was a game where you play as a ball and are tasked with escaping a maze, hence the title. However, not content with a simple "get out of the maze" game, included are these "powerups". These powerups were not designed to help you in any way. They were all designed to hinder you, impede your progress and make your little ball's task harder. These powerups include things like reversing your controls, changing the way the camera behaves, making everything either slower or faster and just being generally annoying. This is not a game designed to be played by people. This is a game designed to play people. The player is not supposed to win, they are simply to prevent the game from winning.

While I made this game for an assignment for university, I want to complete it. Make it at a standard where I can put it on this site and an online games site. Put my own name out there and hope some people go ahead and play it. Below are some screenshots and photos of the process of making the game.

This is the first drawing I ever did for this game. It is the drawing of what the first maze was going to look like, as trying to make a maze from scratch without drafting it was proving more difficult than just buying a gridbook and spending an hour designing a maze. This didn't end up being the maze used in the submission. But it still provides some inspiration for new mazes.

These are my notes and working-outs for how to get the basics of the game running and what the basics of the game were. Scribbled mess and indecipherable nonsense to the outside observer, but this is what makes games.

This is the SketchUp model for the first maze. Eventually exported into Unity for use as the map. Eventually abandoned in place of a better maze. Not quite rendered useless, as the final game will include multiple levels, meaning multiple mazes, and I quite liked this one.

This is the maze used in the final submission of the game. A little more difficult than I intended the maze to be, but after testing this one and building the game around it, I had run out of time/paitence to make a new, easier one.

The game's main menu. As you can see, there are more levels yet to be made. Not a hard task to accomplish either. The code in this game is all modular and easy to implement, meaning that adding to this game is as simple as drag-and-dropping in new pieces and new elements.

When you start a level, you are presented with an option for difficulty. Each difficulty does have it's own set of rules, including how often a powerup can be triggered, how long they alst, and how many exits there are. Also, the exits can move.

This is an image of what happens when a powerup is triggered. The name of the powerup is displayed and whether or not the exits have moved is displayed. The "Give up?" button is permanently on-screen, reminding you that you do not have to play this game that is designed to push your buttons...just so long as you know that that is how the game wins.

#game #annoying #frustration #unity #maze #ball #university