My Maze

I wanted to include a maze in my game from the beginning, I designed a couple originally to see if I could get a 'natural' feel to it. This was simply because humans have long since become extinct in my game, so how would a maze have come around?

To begin with I stuck down some rocks in my level to try and simulate a chaotic, messy feel to the map. However I found when I asked people to play through my prototype they solved the maze with no heedance whatsoever, they simply walked through. This is when I decided to make it a little more challenging and look into maze design. I began finding things about guiding people subliminally, something I definitely wanted to encorporate. So within the maze, on the second design, I made walls to 'direct' people further into the map, thus extending the time taken to complete it.

I also designed my map to be quite large, I wanted it to be big and quite foreboding, you'd walked up to it and once you entered it'd be disorientating, as my level is quite dark, and the rock textures are all the same, it's fairly easy to look around and not know exactly how to get out. This is where my signifiers come in, as I spoke about Pac-Man and the pills in each corner as a short 'break', I included glowing mushroom clusters, these work as pinpoints or something for the player to use as a mental mind map.