In future posts I’m going to walk through the process of creating a poster-sized maze. Just to finish off this little series of posts, I wanted to talk about controlling the randomness in mazes.
This really comes down to personal preference, but I like a maze to feel like something that you can solve, or at the very least, feel like you are traveling through a journey of sorts. What I don’t like is a maze made up of a bunch of very sort pathways leading to a million dead ends. I think of these types of mazes as being like a house of mirrors. You bounce around like a pinball from dead-end to dead-end until by random chance you fall out the end. You might not have any idea how you got to the end. In mazes, I find this kind of design more frustrating then entertaining.
So when I design mazes I try to let the paths go for a while before either coming to a new junction or running into a dead-end. I want the maze runner to feel like they are moving deeper and deeper into the maze – wondering if they made the right choose rather then slamming into a series of dead-ends with little time to think about what they are doing.
Marple Press 