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Hey everyone!

I made this game a couple weeks ago, as part of a game jam. After finishing it, I thought, hey, what if I continued working on it? Admittedly, I'm in a bit of a creative rut right now. I thought it might be interesting if, for once, I started from a prototype and tried to add or change features every week or two. Who knows, maybe if I tinker with it enough, I'll eventually find myself with a hit game :)... if not, it'll still be good practice!

I usually don't document my process very well, so in these devlogs I'll try to share whatever changes I implemented and why I did so, and  go into some of the technical aspects. I hope some of you find these interesting! I'm also gonna share some life updates every now and then, so these might get a bit personal.

As for the game itself. If you're reading this from the future, there's a video below that shows it at the time of this update. You play as Theseus from Greek mythology as he traverses Daedalus's labyrinth looking for the Minotaur.  A thread behind you helps you retrace your steps and a candle that gradually runs out lights your way. Here's some design notes:

- In accordance with the jam's theme (hell), I made the maze endless. When your candle runs out, all that is left is the sound of your character bumping into walls. Technically you could keep going and your score would keep going up, but it would be a grueling, endless process, so I imagined my game to be Theseus's own form of hell... To be honest though, it was just easier to not come up with an end. But I might add one in the future :)

- The maze is procedurally-generated: in a grid, a pointer checks the adjacent cell in a random direction. If it has been visited, it checks the next direction. If it hasn't been visited, it moves to that cell, and a path is traced between the two. If there's no available cell in any direction, the pointer traces its steps back once. Then, the process starts again. This goes on until every cell has been visited.

- In lack of time, I borrowed the melody from Doubt Comes In from Hadestown. I'll try to come up with my own song in a future update.

That's it for now! Let me know in the comments if there's any change you'd like to see in the game. I've already been working on some features based on my friends' feedback, but I'll be sure to consider your suggestions for the following updates! Also let me know if you have any questions about my process!

Thanks for reading my devlog!

Hatim B