Maze Runner Game

So Recently I published this game https://radiantgames.itch.io/maze-runner-game
Although the game has so few views I am about to share what went wrong with the game what things I learned after this project.

Algorithm

So I was interested in Maze Generating Algorithms, How a Computer can generate a random maze. After some tutorials and knowledge about maze generating algorithms, I had to choose between two algorithms. The First one was  Recursive Backtracking Algorithm, here is the link if you want to know more about that https://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2010/12/27/maze-generation-recursive-backtracking and the second choice was Hunt and Kill Algorithm https://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/1/24/maze-generation-hunt-and-kill-algorithm. In the end, I decided on Hunt and Kill Algorithm. So Before telling you how the algorithm works first we need to generate a Grid then we apply the algorithm and the computer carves a random path in the grid.

After Generating the grid we will take 1st row and first column as the starting point and then we will get a random neighbour of that cell and destroy the wall between that cell.

 
We can do this until we reach a dead end. Once that happens we find an unvisited cell where the computer has never been and start the same process of carving the path all over again till we have no unvisited cell.

Player Movement

After making the maze I programmed the player so he can move around the maze. The game was coming together at this point.

User Interface

UI of a game should be simple, intuitive and fluid. That's was my goal for making this game UI anyway. I tried making moving UI as you can see from the main menu itself the camera is moving forward slowly but steadily. Once problem I faced with this was the camera will eventually move out of the maze. I solved this by checking the camera position of each frame and if the position of the camera is close to the wall I reset the camera position. 

Adding Textures

So now I added some textures to the walls and made the ground look like its grass. Before the game felt really blocky but hopefully it doesn't feel like that now.

Adding Sound

Even though the game was almost ready at this point there is still something left. One main thing was sound, The game had no audio up till now. The first thing I did was add footsteps sounds. One more problem I faces now was that even though the footstep sound was playing when I was walking in the game the sound felt too unreal. This was because in real life whenever we walk each footstep sounds a little different whereas I was playing the same footstep sound each time. The solution could be to record different footsteps and choose a random one each time. This was time-consuming so what I did was just randomized the pitch of the same footstep in order to give different sounds.

Publishing the Game

After polishing the game a little more I went to Itch.io and published the game. Now comes the real difficulty which is to market the game and I am really bad at that. So I published a post at Itch.io Community post. Now my goal for this game was to reach 50 downloads and one or two donations maybe. Right now the goal is still far so I decided to write this dev log in order to market the game and share my journey till now. HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT