Click here to launch the maze explorer.

I have combined two of my experiments into something greater than the sum of the parts. Or at least, pretty close to equal to the sum of the parts. The height map explorer from a couple of weeks ago, combined with the maze from a few days ago. The combining took me all of ten minutes.

Now that I have got this far, I next need to start playing with collision detection so players can navigate the mazes, instead of flying over them.

A more technical description of this experiment can be found on my GameDev blog

A generated maze. Click the image to play.

 

Sorry for the title; I couldn’t help myself.

I took the Java code from the Wikipedia article on Maze Generation Algorithms, converted it to Actionscript, and Voila! A randomly generated maze of practically infinite variations. For all intents and purposes it is just an image at the moment, but I will soon add wall detection and turn it into a game of some kind. Click anywhere on the maze to generate a new one.

An update to the game. Click the screenshot to see it in action.

Still very rough, but playable for the moment. Arrow keys to move clockwise/widdershins, and SPACE to fire.

Click the image to see the experiment in action.

 

Arrow keys to move clockwise/widdershins. Click the movie if nothing happens at first.

My tile game experiments led me back to an old project where I was trying to recreate/reinvent the game Gyruss in Flash. I was playing around with the Perlin Noise generation functionality in Flash, and co-incidentally came across a polar distortion class at BIT-101. I took it, played with it a bit, and figured out how to go from Polar Distortion to Twirl, with the addition of one very short line of code. Voila! I had the thing you see above. The addition of a simple gradient provides the depth.