Prismatic Maze
Prismatic Maze is my effort to make a game with interesting mazes.
It started as a project to make a Maze game where the world made sense, where the player had a reasons to explore the maze or to go from start to finish, where the world had some areas that were logically separated from other areas in a logical way.
The idea was to build off the Ecology Engine project I'd been working on as a hobby to make a full game using some of the principles I'd been thinking about since childhood.
I wanted to make a good Maze game while merging as many of those principles as possible and building the foundation for future games expanding on the game engine.
It by exploring procedural generation, cellular automata, emergent behavior, organic lifecycles, expanding access via lock-and-key mechanics, nested loops and a ton of other concepts.
What emerged from that was a game about a conflict between Light and Darkness.
In Prismatic Maze, maps are not pre-built or purely random, they are grown.
Maps are seeded with Pigment creatures who grow larger over time like bacteria in a pitri dish, filling their inside area with maze walls.
Pigments bump up against each other, punch doors through to the other side and hide keys inside the bodies of their neighbors.
You play as an agent of White and are tasked with bringing light to the Black Tower, which is hidden and locked away somewhere on the same map.
You must find keys to unlock the doors barring your way, break into the domains of your neighbors, exploring to steal their seeds to unlock the Black Tower.
Along the way, you can find items to assist you in your travels as well as ingredients to build new maps.