jothin-kumar / a-maze

A-Maze

Create, Play, Share & Print mazes

(C) 2024 Jothin Kumar
MIT Licence
Play now at a-maze.jothin.tech

Maze Generation Demo

1. Easy Level: joth.in/8e
2. Medium Level: joth.in/8m
3. Hard Level: joth.in/8h

Help

How to play?

• Find the green dot in the maze. This will be the starting position
• Find the red dot in the maze. This will be the final position
• Start navigating to the final position

Navigation

• Devices with physical keyboard: Use arrow keys or WASD to move. For Navigation Assist, press and hold space bar
• Touch screen devices: Drag anywhere on the maze, in the direction you intend to move. To scroll, tap anywhere on the maze and drag immediately. For Navigation Assist, press and hold anywhere on the maze (or perform any other action that might trigger contextmenu)

Navigation Assist

• In some cases, there is only one possible move other than going back
• In these cases, you need not manually navigate. Navigation Assist comes in handy here

Common problems & solutions

• Visibility issues: Disable any browser extensions that might interfere with color of the website. (eg: dark reader)

a-maze's Issues

Scale up the maze

The maze is too small. Increase it's size on all levels

Start not visible in portrait screen

If the start is at the bottom part of maze, then the user has to scroll to see the start position of maze.

This issue is faced in portrait screens

Example maze

Add maze data validation

Invalid maze being treated as a valid one (shared maze)

Correct path in a maze is never supposed to have a square more than once. Such paths are never generated. However, if such paths are shared, then it is loaded regardless.
Example

To fix this, repetition in correct path shall be checked

"bbda---" is an invalid maze data but it does not raise an error

Blink current position

Update README

Update README after fixing #7 and #8

Better accessibility for on screen navigation

• prevent it from hiding start position

Rating issue caused by getting rid of unused squares

Running the following code in any URL of the format https://a-maze.jothin.tech/2d?maze-data=... is supposed to return true

(new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)).get("maze-data") == exportMaze()

After "get rid of unused squares" feature is added, the exportMaze() function started including the hidden lines of unused squares in the maze data as well. This does not cause any issue with newly shared mazes. However, the old ones get affected by this.

The getDifficulty() function is affected by this issue as well. The rating prior to the change and the rating rn are not the same. There is an slight increase.

Solution

• while exporting the maze or calculating difficulty, exclude the lines associated with unused squares
• In the maze collection, replace any maze data added after the change

Keep the onscreen nav out of maze, whenever possible

Make the maze difficulty logic more fair

If a square is not connected to the main path, it should not be listed in maze data. Otherwise, the maze data is corrupted