Maze - my first real game (FrooxArchive #11)

Hello everyone and welcome to another FrooxArchive post!

First, I’m sorry again for becoming less regular with these posts. My main work has been keeping me pretty busy, but it’s still in a phase where I can’t talk about it (which sucks, because I’d love to tell you all about it). Thank you for being so patient with me and apologies again if these posts are a bit more sporadic for a bit!

Anyway, as promised, today I bring you one of my really old games, in fact my first “real” game - “Maze”. I lost the exact date, but it was made sometime around 2003, when I got my first computer. Getting my first PC was actually a pretty big deal - my mum was already divorced and working in healthcare, which doesn’t pay well here.

Since most other kids already had computers at home, my mum figured that it’d be important for me and my brother to have one as well and used her current pension fund savings to buy us one.

We didn’t have internet at home until a few years later, because we could not afford it at the time, so I was reliant on software I could get from CD’s enclosed with various computer magazines, from other family members and occasional internet access in the library.

One day, while we were doing yard work at school, one of my classmates told me about an article with a tutorial for a tool called “GameMaker” and let me borrow the issue with the included CD.

The article was essentially a tutorial on how to make a simple maze game with the included assets. This was enough for me to get a foot in the door and start experimenting and exploring around to do more.

This Maze game is essentially the end result of that experimentation - from a simple single level, I ended up making a multi-level game, with enemies, bosses and various other gimmicks, turning it into my first “real” game ever.

Being that old, it’s full of design flaws, frustrating parts and elements, it’s nothing to write home about, but for me, this was a key moment that got me on a path of game design and programming - and learning from those flaws - seeing how they experience frustrating and why.

If you don’t feel like going through the game yourself, I have recorded a playthrough you can watch, but if you’d want to give it a try, you can download it below. While the text is in Czech, the controls are pretty simple:

Press any key to start at the intro screen.

Arrow Keys - Move Around

Collect a coin - 100 points + 1 % health (it goes over 100, so you can stack up a lot)

F5 - Save

F6 - Load

P - Pause

Esc - Exit game

Delete - Clear High Score

Anyway, that’s it for my first game. I hope you liked this post and that you like the video format with the commentary - let me know what you think! I have tons of these old games to show off and a bunch of stories about them to share.

Thank you very much again for your support and see you with the next one!