The Endless Maze: How It's Going

Today, I'd like to briefly talk about the main feature of one of our puzzle levels - The "Endless" Maze.

The original concept for the maze was a backrooms-inspired building hallway where eyes would appear in the walls and watch the player as they moved, and since the backrooms are generally thought of as endless, we wanted to try and emulate that somehow. What we ended up settling on was random generation, with a teleporting mechanic to return the player to the start of the maze if they go the wrong way.

The first thing we needed for random generation was some room prefabs to feed to the generator, so I created a few different room shapes with exits on different sides of the room:

Next,  I created a starting zone for the maze generator, so the player has a room to return to from any angle they might be facing, so the teleport looks seamless:

Then I had to get to the meat of the project, I wrote a script that picks a random room to spawn from the list above, generates a few hallways to attach it to the rest of the maze, sets its rotation, then detects the exits based on that, and adds any exits to a list so it can generate more “branches” of the maze.

For this design, there isn’t a lot of reason to have extended branches down the “incorrect paths, so I just made them all dead ends. Below are a few screenshots of the level generation in action:
 

Finally, we wanted to make the eyes on the walls more unsettling, so I had to create a quick system to get them to follow the player:

The maze is still a work in progress, but I think it's shaping up very well, and I'm currently in the process of rewriting it to implement some inspirations from the Lost Woods from Zelda, and as well as testing some mini-puzzles inside the rooms of the maze itself, I'm excited to show everyone how it turns out in the end!