What's the Point?

Get to the end of as many mazes as possible, scoring as many points as you can along the way. Oh, and you only have sixty seconds to do so.

You'll encounter ★ yellow stars and ★ blue stars.

• First yellow star in each level: +1 point
• Second yellow star: +4 points
• Blue star: +10 seconds

Finishing a maze gives you five points.

Mouse/Touchscreen

Using the mouse (or touchscreen), simply drag the cursor (the small brown circle) through the maze. You can also tap on the adjacent highlighted squares to move to them. (This is particularly handy on the 3D and 4D levels, in order to navigate the stairs/portals.)

Keyboard

Using the keyboard is slower, but easier if you don't have a mouse or touchscreen. Here, wasd is your friend.

The w and s keys move the cursor (respectively) up and down, and a and d move you left and right.

On the 3D and 4D levels, i and k move you vertically between levels, and j and k move you horizontally. (The ijkl keys will only work when you are positioned on one of the red pointers.)

What is this thing?

Mazoo is a maze game. The goal is to traverse as many mazes as you can, as quickly as you can, accumulating as many points as possible along the way.

How is it done?

The mazes are generated using the Growing Tree algorithm, choosing the last cell 75% of the time, and the most heavily weighted cell the other 25% of the time.

If you're curious about the implementation, the source code for Mazoo! is available on GitHub, here:

https://github.com/jamis/mazoo

Where can I learn more?

I've written a book, "Mazes for Programmers", which goes into the topic at great length, and includes projects and source code and all kinds of fascinating things!

https://pragprog.com/book/jbmaze/mazes-for-programmers

I also wrote a series of articles on the topic of random mazes a few years ago. They are summarized here:

http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorithm-recap

I have more questions. Who can I talk to?

My name is Jamis Buck. I check my email sometimes, at [email protected]. I'm @jamis on Twitter, and you can find my code on GitHub as jamis.

Mazoo! by Jamis Buck is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.