Category Archives: Gaming

Maze Game Update – v3 – downloadable

It turned out that the reason Maze Game does not run on Medley’s laptop was not related to the time required to generate the maze. So even though that is a nice improvement, it does not allow my currently primary audience to play my game 😛

A second attempt at running it is done by exporting it to a Windows executable. Not sure whether it will work, but we’ll find out soon enough. Depending on that, my next steps are either diving deeper into why it doesn’t run or coming up with an actual play improvement.

You can find the executable right here.

Maze Game Update – v3!

Hey all!

Another week has passed, and another update for Maze Game has landed! Click here to check it out.

The major addition this game was inspired by Medley, who actually loved playing Maze Game. But sadly, it did not run on her laptop, because the maze generator uses a complex algorithm that will randomly attempt to create paths in the maze grid. This algorithm can take a long time to complete, and as her laptop is incredibly slow, the game appeared to not load at all.

So, to circumvent this, Maze Game no longer generates mazes. Instead, this feature has been moved to a remote server, which will ensure a buffer of randomly generated mazes is ready to be served instantly. As such, the loading time of Maze Game has dropped significantly.

As an added bonus for me personally, this feature allows me to gain some insight into how often Maze Game is used, as the mazes are marked off once served. On top of that, I can now run maze analyzers to check the difficulty of mazes and this feature is one of the required components for maze highscores.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Same as last time, there are various steps I can take at this point and I haven’t put any thought into deciding which will be the next one. So again, you’ll have to wait and see what’s going to happen next.

Until then, happy mazing!

Maze Game Update – v2!

Hey all!

With some free time today and some help from Lena, I managed to churn out the next version of Maze Game! Click to check it out.

This version focuses on increasing the challenge of the game by no longer allowing you to see the entire maze at once. To compensate, a random set of walls is removed, so there is no longer just a single path between any two points.

As an aside, it baffles me how simple it is to achieve certain things in Godot. Having the camera follow the player turned out to be a piece of cake, with most of the challenge in this update lying in scaling the maze to work with the updated sprite. This makes participating in game jams seem a lot more realistic, so perhaps I’ll share some of that in the future as wel.

As for Maze Game, there’s a few different paths that I’m considering for the next update. However, I don’t want to spoil what I have planned, so you’ll have to wait and see what it’ll be.

Until then, happy mazing!

Maze Game Update – v1.1.0!

Hey all,

Today marks the release of Maze Game v1.1.0. This version makes the game actually playable, allowing you to navigate the maze searching for the goal. The game is still pretty simple, as solving the maze itself is not that difficult. However, I’m expecting to up the difficulty in the next release. Hopefully, that release will also allow me to improve some of the visuals.

Also, if you happen to have some older links you may notice don’t work any more. To add some consistency and remove duplication, I’m going to be sticking to the single Maze Game title.

Happy mazing!

P.S. Lena wants me to mention that she really likes that I’m making games 😛 Thanks Lena!

Magical7.com Games

It has been a long time since this site saw any updates. Lots of things have happened in the two and a half years since my last post. A few months before my last I Never post, Lena and I had just founded our very own company called Prizecards.nl, a small webshop dealing in trading card games. About a year and a half later, in April 2019, we rented a location to run our shop as a physical store. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite turn out the way we wanted it and since then we have decided to stop running the company. We have managed to arrange termination of our rental contract and are currently selling the remainder of our stock from our site. Coincidentally, if you’re in the Netherlands or Belgium and are interested in some cheap Pokémon TCG, Magic: the Gathering or accessory products, check out our deals at https://shop.prizecards.nl/product-categorie/uitverkoop/.

Anyway, quitting the store suddenly gave me a lot of free time to work with and no hobbies to fill this gap. I have picked up playing Dota 2 again, which is fun, but mostly as an “relaxing” pastime. However, I also need something that I can spend loads of time in, preferably something that also results in actual products that I can share with people who like them.

The biggest obstacle preventing this is my fear of commitment to a single hobby. Heck, the entire I Never series is a testament to my desire to jump from one experience to another. But obviously doing lots of different things meant that I could never develop any skill. So, I have decided to say goodbye to all of my hobbies that I have ever dabbled into or not even started trying and pick a single hobby to focus on.

I chose game development. Which is a pretty broad hobby, covering both design and implementation of any games, be they physical or virtual. But I really like all the components that go into the creation of games and a lot overlap with my previous hobbies, including mechanics design (one of my favorite parts of D&D), art, music, and story-telling. And of course I love playing games, so it all combines into a neat package.

And mostly to force myself to actually dive into this, I’ve created my first deliverable before publicly talking about starting this hobby. So if you’re interested, hop on over to Maze Game 1 to check out my first “game”.

Of course, since I’m just starting out, I have a lot to learn, but that’s really the fun part. That and working towards the creation of the game I have in mind right now. But I’ll write some more about what I’m actually planning at a later point.

For now, I’m excited to work on this new hobby and I hope you’ll tag along for this new ride.