Overview This little dippy game is near and dear to my heart. It is based on the very first program I released as shareware back in 1992. That program was a BBS door game entitled The Labyrinth Door. The idea was simple, find your way though a maze using only an overhead view of the square you're in and the 8 adjacent squares. The only graphics available at the time for BBS games were ANSI graphics (ASCII with color). So, the game board was made up entirely of text characters. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. In 1998, after closing the Bumpkinland BBS and opening bumpkinland.com, I took a shot at converting the old DOS program into a web based game. I succeeded, but... Although the graphics were MUCH better, the game play sucked due to the fact I had to refresh the page every time the player moved in the maze. Keep in mind, this was in the days of dial-up and the 14.4k modem (for the younger crowd, that's 1/4 of the standard dial-up speed today). The game sucked so bad, it was never made available to the public. When I started dabbling in Flash about a month ago, I started to see the potential for re-creating my old friend and finally getting it to bumpkinland.com. However, I decided early on that the old overhead view wasn't going to cut it, I wanted 3D. So, sitting in a parking lot one day with some time to kill, I started sketching out what 9 squares of a maze would look like in 3D. When I got back home, I spent a few hours researching 3D and Flash only to find that you can't do it. Well, at least not without adding 3rd party software. I almost gave up. That's when inspiration stuck. It occurred to me that I could fake the 3D using layers and transparency. At least as long as I was only working with a small "world" consisting of 9 cubes and a stationary view. All I needed to do was to create a graphic for each face of the 9 cubes as it would look standing at a given point, then layer them background to foreground. Now I just needed a way to visualize the faces of the cubes. That's where Google Sketchup comes in. I popped into Sketchup and created my world of 9 cubes. I then set the material for all the faces to a semi-transparent glass and positioned the camera as if I was standing in one of the outside center cubes. Voila, one screen shot later I had a graphic of what my world would look like. I took this graphic into Photoshop and created layers for each of the different faces of the cubes. I saved the layers as individual PNG files with only the target face visible and the rest of the image transparent then I started writing code. After making the fake 3D work and adding the ability to walk around in the maze, I decided that an overhead view was still needed. So, I added a little map. However, having the map visible made the game too easy. So, I went back to my old system of only showing the 9 squares. This wasn't good enough. That's when inspiration stuck again. What if I keep track of when the player visited each square of the maze and then show the map for all the squares visited in the past 30 seconds? Better yet, what if I just used the elapsed time since the player visited a given square to decide the Alpha value for the lines to draw that square on the map? Voila, Harry Potter like disappearing map. I liked it! I could go on about some of the programming challenges of doing fake 3D, but this description is getting way too long! I hope you enjoy the game. Oh wait, there is one more thing... Once I had the game somewhat completed, I noticed that it was going to take a little longer to load than I thought was a reasonable amount of time to watch a loading bar. I thought it would be better if you had something to do while you were waiting. That's when I decided to add a Tiny Dippy Game to play while the main game is loading. The game I added was one I have given much thought to creating while riding around my 3 acres of yard on the trusty lawn mower. Specifically, I was thinking wouldn't it be nice if I had a way to test different mowing strategies to see which one was the fastest and/or most efficient. A dippy little Flash game seemed like the perfect format for such a program. There is one problem though. Now I find myself sitting at the loading screen and playing the lawn mower game without ever getting to the main game. I might have to split it off into a full blown Dippy game. In case you're wondering, it's a Yazoo YR60. Three wheels, single rear wheel steering. That's why it drives funky. For comparison purposes, I can finish most of the yards in under one minute, the rest in under 1:30. Don't forget to click the control to activate it, then you can mow. OK, that's all. Enjoy the game(s)...
How To Play Your goal is to find your way out of a maze. The controls are simple. You can move forward or turn by clicking on the appropriate arrow on the screen, or using your arrow keys. The ball in the center of the arrows indicates how close you are to the exit. Red means more than 10 squares, yellow means 5-10 squares, green means within 5 squares. Keep in mind though that's squares as a crow flies. The ball may be green even when there's no way to get to the exit from where you are. The red, yellow, and green stones just below the view port are to be used as markers. Click on one to place it in the maze square in which you stand. When you come back to the square, you'll find your stone. The stones also show up on the map. Be sparing with them however, you only have 5 of each color and you can't pick them back up again. Once you find the exit, you're out of the maze and you win.
Scoring In the original BBS door version, I kept track of how many moves it took to get to the exit and had a high scores screen (or low moves screen as the case may be). For this version I decided not to do that. So, there is no scoring, all you get is the satisfaction of beating the maze.
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