Title: L3 - Game Challenge 6-3
Course: RITA MC - VIDEO GAME DESIGN HYBRID > Section: Module 3

Game Challenge 6 - More than a MAZE

Consider the maze to be a type of exploration puzzle. A basic maze with arbitrary paths is not particulary compelling to a player who has seen many mazes before. Many older RPGs required players to make a map of a series of mazes as they played. Today, most gamers would consider this "busywork" and prefer that the game provided an automatic mapping function. For this challenge, though, let's give the palyer a reason to make his own map.

Brainstorm as many mechanics as you can think of that can be added to a simple maze, which makes the process of mapping a puzzle in and of itself. Come up with at least three ideas.

One example (which you're not allowed to use as one of your own ideas for this challenge) is the maze from the classic Atari 2600 game adventure. In this game, the maze "wraps around" so that moving to the left may cause you to reappear on the right side of the maze. You may pass near the same point several times when you're actually in a completely different section of the maze. In this way, mapping and navigating are made more difficult, and become quite a puzzle, even though the maze itself is not very large. Again, include an enemy character that must be killed before you can map an area, or some other way for an enemy character to wreak havoc in your MAZE game.

Components Required: Graph paper

Deliverable:

- A short sentence up to a paragraph describing each mechanic that you can think of
- A sample hand-drawn maze illustrating the mechanics described.

Suggested Process

1. Brainstorm.
It's tempting to start by thinking of any games you played that had nonstandard mapping or navigation mechanics. However this runs the risk of constraining your creativity, because you may have trouble coming up with your own ideas if you're constantly thinking of other people's. Try to be original first, and then think of existing games only when your own ideas are spent.
2. Create deliverable.