In my last post, I talked about how planning the path of your maze will help you control the difficulty for your users. For smaller mazes you can probably do this step in your head. Just visualize the path and try to stick to it the best you can while drawing out your maze. However, for larger projects, making a map of your pathways will not only help you craft your maze, but it will keep you from drawling yourself into a corner (by which I mean making a maze with no exits!).
“1 Maze 1 Book” is 81 pages long. There is no way I could have drawn out the whole maze without some sort of planned path. The maze was planned out like a grid: 9 pages wide by 9 pages high. Where each page touches, there would be two connection points allowing the player to move form one page to the other. Each blank page would look something like this…
A blank page with exit points.
Let’s say my maze was 4 pages long (in a grid 2×2). Here is how I would plan out the maze…
Maze planning map.
The red line marks the main pathway. The black lines mark all the off-shoots. You can see I have all the connection points counted for. What I DON’T do is figure out all the little subpaths, or for that matter the exact path any line takes through any page. This map provides just enough detail to keep track for where you are going so you don’t box your self in.
Marple Press 