This is a Postmortem for this game

About 2 and a half years ago we released this short and strange game called Maze X for a 72-hour game jam, and now we ported it to the web.

For me, this would turn out to be the last game I designed for quite a while - in fact, it was only this month that I finally opened up a game engine and my design notebooks again after almost half a decade. It's a bit strange, and I'm not talking about the game - although it is quite strange - but I find it quite curious how and why this game came to be, because when we did Maze X I was already not making games anymore.

When the pandemic rolled in, my life was completely shaken, and I guess this was the experience for many people. One of the things that kept me going was that I started doing something I always wanted to do: making games. I had tried before, but failed time and time again, either due to a lack of time, lack of motivation or simply because rookie mistakes were piling up and I couldn't get it done. The first game I actually "shipped" was about the experience of the pandemic itself - you can play it here. Two things to note about making that game: The first is that I didn't do it alone, it was a team effort, and the second was that, although the game is "complete" as it is, it definitely isn't as complete as I wanted it to be originally. These two things would be true for all games I've worked on during that time.

And it was fun to make games. A bit frustrating, always felt I was somewhat lagging behind. I learned a lot, and I did achieve some good results, but it always felt... I don't know, a bit underwhelming. It was October 2021 when me and a small team published what would be my last game of that period - a short and sweet adventure/puzzle game for halloween, inspired by old cartoon network games I used to play as a kid. It was also in that same October that, on a cool but sunny morning, I left my house to see some friends. But we weren't gonna meet to chat, drink or play something, we were dearly missing doing those things because of the quarantine, but it wasn't time for them just yet. We were actually going out to take our shots of the Covid vaccine, as it was being distributed to our age range. And from that day forward, life changed, gradually things were improving, and I was very excited for 2022. I eventually got a job, started new projects and resumed old ones, but none of them were about games. For me making games was a childhood dream that finally came to be during the pandemic, but that also ended with it.

Then came Maze X, like, just randomly, almost 2 years after the last of my pandemic games. Even now I can't remember why I suddenly decided to participate in one more game jam, out of the blue. It's just so random, I didn't go back to making games, I just did this one over a weekend and it was over again. But it happened, and I'm glad it did. Many things came together for this game to exist. I wanted a small team to make the game with me, so I sent a message to ZeroStas, who worked with me on other games before, and I found Cheek boy on a discord or itch.io forum, and it turned out that he was a pretty cool guy - thanks for finding the game files and porting it to the web dude! The theme of the jam was deception, and Cheek had this prototype about drawing mazes algorithmically in Unity, so I came up with the idea to make a dungeon crawler puzzle/horror game about a deceptive maze you need to escape from. Zero made some really creepy art - it has this sharp and dirty look that gives me Iron Lung vibes - and Cheek made the whole thing work through coding magic.

My contribution was designing the maze, writing the "plot" and making the music. It was so fun. A friend of mine had left his Korg Monologue synthesizer with me for a while and I remember plugging that bad boy up late at night and just making the most disturbing and discomforting noises I could. I recorded that, recorded my voice with a lot of reverb, processed everything and made the 20-minute avant-garde mess that is this game soundtrack. I kind of love it. I remember also designing the dungeon itself in an online RPG map tool I used for... Well, for RPG maps. I was really cruel with the design of the game - that was the point, I guess. Looping corridors, darkness, hidden traps, it all contributes to a constant sense of being lost. Dying is the only thing that "helps" - it leaves a mark!

I was quite proud of this design at the time, and now with the web port, I replayed the game after many years and... Boy it's hard. Not sure I enjoyed it that much, it is quite unsettling for sure, and also frustrating, it really tries your patience. And after many deaths, getting lost too many times and solving mildly infuriating riddles, I finally reached the end of the game, only to be confronted with the cherry on top of this aggressive game design: There is no end. Maybe this is bold artsy design, and you CAN'T escape the maze, or maybe we simply ran out of time and did not implement the end... Well, to be honest, feels suiting.

Now, one question remains, why port this somewhat unfinished game to WebGL after so many years? Well, because late in 2025 I decided to start making games again, so my January this year has been all about that - I'm currently working on a sequel to Admin, my favorite game of the ones I made and a game which has enjoyed an unexpected late success on Itch.io - and in this process, I revisited my old games and, when I revisited this one, I simply thought "why not?", if I manage to get the original files, it should be simple enough, so let's port it so more people can play! Spoiler: It wasn't simple at all. There were many technical problems, but thankfully Cheeky is such a smart and cool guy and he managed to get the game running on the web, albeit with more compressed visuals.

So yeah, go ahead, play this mess. Have "fun". Or don't. You know what? Here, take this: This is Maze X's GDD. It's an interesting read, it shows the process I went through when designing the game, it reveals all the magic, solves all the puzzles. Go ahead, play the game with this open in another tab, cheat it! Throughout the years, the maze has tortured and confused the hundred or so people that downloaded this game, but not anymore! For the web players that dare to venture through the maze, the alchemists have prepared yet another gift, and this one reveals the true path forward. Even with the map, the game is still a bit challenging - you have to read and interpret the map after all. But if you manage to get to the ending, congratulations. Nothing will flash on the screen saying "hey you won", there will be no prize or special award to you, but know that I sincerely congratulate you, you made something incredible. You completed not one, but two things. You finished the game, and you finished reading this postmortem too, that's a lot. Trust me, completing things is not easy, by now you know I have experience leaving things unfinished, but not you, you did it! Hey, maybe now you can go and have some motivation to finish other stuff too, be it a game or not. I will be around, working on my next games - who knows, maybe this one will even have a proper ending!

GabeMalk