Ice Age Maze Escape

Ice Age Maze Escape is an original video game I made in Processing/Java as a project for the Video Games (CS4303) module at the University of St Andrews during Candlemas semester of the 2021/2022 academic year. A report of Ice Age Maze Escape's details, software specifications, and creation can be found here. A player guide detailing all relevant information necessary for playing Ice Age Maze Escape such as controls, game rules, and inventory items can be found here.

Ice Age Maze Escape is a single-player video game of my own creation. The genre of Ice Age Maze Escape can be best described as a hybrid puzzle, action, and strategy game. The main gameplay of Ice Age Maze Escape consists of a player looking to navigate through a series of mazes for as long as possible before their health runs out. The puzzle element of the game is mainly incorporated via the constant pressure on players to search for paths throughout mazes to get to various objects. Within each maze there are also AI enemies looking to always attack. This is the action part of the game, as players must combat these foes. Strategy plays a massive role in being successful at Ice Age Maze Escape, as players must always manage the items they collect in the maze and plan ahead for future scenarios.

There are noticeable technical capabilities on display in Ice Age Maze Escape. The game contains lots of procedurally generated content, where mazes and placement of objects are procedurally generated, along with various other object and character features such as power-up type/number per maze or number of enemies per maze. All this procedurally generated content helps to maintain everlasting novelty of gameplay for players, as they are unlikely to ever play the exact same set of mazes with the same objects and characters twice. Furthermore, there is some artificial intelligence present in the game, where there are enemies in the maze that can track the player down and follow them through the maze via A-Star search. Also, there is some interesting physics at work that controls the player’s movement in the maze. As the player progresses through the mazes, the temperature gets colder and the ground that the player walks on becomes more and more icy, hence the game starts to simulate varying levels of “slip” in the player’s movement due to the ice becoming colder and colder.

Processing was used to develop Ice Age Maze Escape, and the Minim audio library was used to manage and trigger all audio elements of the game. The inclusion of audio plays a significant role in the gameplay and overall gameplay experience for users, as the audio is used to convey important information or reinforce actions within the game.

A brief video demonstration of gameplay from Ice Age Maze Escape can be viewed below: