Actually, this game has been on the drawing board for a very long time. I guess a variety of things happened and got in the way. Can I even think of them all, hmmmmm. Anyway, I can tell you it's origins, the game design and hopefully, I can get this game off the ground and running in the Windows environment.
The very first Maze-a-mania game was written for the TRS-80 (TRaSh-80) Color Computer 2 (CoCo) way back in 1988 by me. It was, needless to say, graphically challenged. The problem was, I wrote the game in BASIC and the computer itself was slow compared to today's standards. On top of that, it had a small memory core (a mere 64K of RAM). For those who are unfamiliar with all of that, just imagine, ummmm, well forget it. I bet a lot of you reading this page were probably just being born in 1988 or just sometime close by. Anyway....
As I was saying, the video game itself was graphically challenged. That, and the sound effects were terrible, if you could call them sound effects. Of course, it was my own and I was so proud. I hope that you will think the same way as I work on its sequel and outline its steps here. If you're looking for a 3D game, you will not find it here as this game was designed somewhere around 1991 (the era of Nintendo NES and Sega Genesis). Many of the techniques I use here you may find that you can port to your own games. I promise you that this game will not be as graphically challenged as the CoCo version. ;)
I guess it would be best to start with some background. I had been writing a variety of games for the CoCo for a couple of years when I got the inspiration to write Maze-a-mania. I had laid the foundation for writing maze games on the CoCo with some simpler Maze games that I had completed so far so I had some code to work with on this creation. The inspiration came from all those days I spent playing Super Mario Brothers and Burger Time in a peer house on the beach somewhere near Wilmington, NC. This was way back in the summer of 1987.
The first version of Maze-a-mania that I released for the CoCo was not exactly what I had envisioned it to be, but it was working and I will just leave it at that. You're player is scurrying about a maze finding items and power ups before they expire and trying to exit before time expires. Two opponents (monsters) and two bats (levels 5 and up) try to stop you. Thankfully, some power ups enable you to overcome these creatures. The magic fireball enable you to shoot down bats and stun monsters, once they're stunned, stomp them to destroy them. However, these creatures do return so there is no rest until you've completely exited the maze. A special power up, known as the varium bracelet, enables your character to become much stronger which will last until you are attacked where your character returns to normal strength. If you have the magic fireball and the varium bracelet, your magic fireball becomes the magic missile (not quite like the magic missile in Dungeons and Dragons, but somewhat similar) that you can use to destroy monsters and bats as well tear down most maze walls. A few other items and power up exist as well, but those are the most important ones.
This game had twenty mazes and I believe that if you completed all of them, you begin again at maze one. This was a departure from the original design where I wanted to add a full story line as well as more scenes. However, the limitations of the CoCo as well as the limitations of the tools I had for programming it did not permit me to do anything more extravagant. In fact, since the program itself was written in Extended Color Basic running through the interpreter, I had to eliminate the graphics. Reducing it down to a series of dots for the characters. This is what I meant by 'graphically challenged.'
About a year later, after finishing this project, I figured I could make the game more interesting. Instead of scurrying about one maze throughout the entire level, I figured I'd have the character (dot) scurry about several mazes in search of items and treasure. To make it more interesting, instead of powering up our character with magic missiles and fireballs, a 'gun' is given instead to take out the monsters and the bats. Also, many treasures are hidden behind walls that can only be torn down with bombs, so our character had to scurry about looking for bombs to blast these walls. Finally, to exit the level, one had to find three keys used to open the door(s) found throughout the mazes in the level. The inspiration for this game came from a few games I've played at the time including Spelunker, Star Tropics, and The Goonies (all for the NES). Again, due to the limitations of the CoCo as well as the slowness of the BASIC interpreter, the characters and items were reduced to dots and the game ran extremely slow.
A few years later, after finally mastering machine language (ML) programming (a term used by programmers at the time to describe Assembly language programming) I was able to produce fast action games that actually utilized graphics and NOT DOTS. I had already produced a basic sub battle type game that ran entirely in assembly and had laid plans to redesign the Maze-a-mania games. I did not want to jump directly to graphics just yet as I simply wanted to see the game run faster at the time. Mixing assembly with BASIC, I was able to enhance the original Maze-a-mania 2 game. Then I had an idea on how I could use assembly language to decompress mazes on the fly. The original Maze-a-mania 2 game had 6 levels and 36 mazes of game play. Within the same amount of memory used to store the 36 mazes, I could double the maze count. A new design was beginning to take shape as I further enhanced the game with boss monster, more levels, and more mazes. This is the original design for Maze-a-mania 2: Maze Atlantis.
Rather than spend too much time pouring over the details on its current development. I prefer to make the latest work in progress available for download. Click here to receive the latest source code and work in progress executable. Take a look at it and send me any questions and/or comments. As I complete more of it, I will describe what I did in the design process. As of right now, I prefer to focus my efforts on the game development than on talking about the game development.