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Hi, I'm thinking of building another procedurally generated game for guideme, and this time it's a maze tease. The maze will be however big you want, however hard you want, with lots of settings for both the maze and the girls that you encounter there, new and random every time (but you can play one maze during multiple days and save your location).
Now i could make this thing mappable, but I personally think its less fun, so i am leaning to completely messed up unmappable maze aproach for now.
Being unmappable doesn't mean it will be untraversible. I plan to implement biomes, so one part of the maze may be forest, another will be dungeon and so on. To furter help you navigate, i will create milestones in each biome - it will be intersections with a unique picture throughout the entire tease. For example, a bridge in the forest that would be easy to remember.

This thread is for two things:
1) gathering possible ideas
2) finding out how people feel about unmappable mazes.

maybe some fetish not only edge and stroke, like cbt, anal and other stuff?

I personally don't enjoy those too much - that's why I can't really write them. But the tasks will be modular like in denial mistress , so you can add your own fetishes. Read denial mistress thread to find out how you can enlist MY help with those fetishes - its a standing ordered

I prefer mappable mazes.
The problem with them is, that once you mapped it, it's no challenge anymore to finish it. But I think, it'll still be fun to play with random encounters. Especially when the traps/teases are at different positions.

Maybe it's even possible to set the exit each time at a different location, so it will still be challenging.

Mappable or not, my maze will be randomly generated each time, and will have no common parts with the previous maze you played.

One thing I hate on most of the maze teases is the need to repeat some encounters when you are lost... It would be good if the girl remembers you and modify her behaviour. :)

As for that, I was planning to give each girl (or you may think each trap) a number of stats. For example this girl prefers edging, and another one - stroking. Based on this preferences they will give you a session that is different every time, but still goes in line with preferences.

Additionally I plan to save her photoset state, so that when you meet her again she will ne partially undressed, then next time even more so. Of course if you stumble at the same trap over and over, she will restart photoset eventually.

As for treating you differently - well, i can easyly track how many times you visited each trap, and how long ago was it, but i dont know what to do with this info. I can easily make something happen, when you visit her several times over a short period, but I don't know what. I like the idea though.

One thing that I like about maps to mazes is so that I can make sure to visit every "trap" before exiting.

The traps will be random each time you visit them, so I don't know what would be the point, really. Because you can just create a new tease and have new traps there. You can say there's an indefinite supply of traps.

To be honest I'm a little unclear about what an unmappable maze looks like. If you're at point A and you go in a certain direction you end up at point B. If you find yourself back at point A, going in that direction again should get you to point B again (if you're facing in the same direction of course). If that's not the case it's not really a maze, it's a random set of pages.

I generally prefer them to be mappable, since the goal is to find a way out, not get lost forever in a maze. The downside is there's no replay value, but since you are generating a random maze each time you eliminate that little issue and we get the best of both worlds.

PG

To be clear - the maze will look like a number of intersections with choices like
go left
go right
go straingt
go back
Some of those may be unavaliable on certain intersections (like if it's a T-intersection there will be only 3 directions to go).
The maze will be consistent, so you can go back and backtrack your way completely.

The Unmappable bit of it is about how paths are connected. The mappable maze you can draw on a piece of paper easily. Unmappable includes corridors that go underneath other corridors. That makes it very hard to map properly, especially considering obvious limitations on pictures for pages. Basically, it's a maze that you can't draw without crossing other corridors.
Depending on sheer luck and your settings, you may end up with a completely mappable 2d variant, or a maze that looks more like a ball of lines, each of them is corridors. And you can't draw something like that.

I generally prefer them to be mappable, since the goal is to find a way out, not get lost forever in a maze. The downside is there's no replay value, but since you are generating a random maze each time you eliminate that little issue and we get the best of both worlds.

Since I am allowing you to exit at any point of a maze and continue next time, there's no real need for a map, right?

Nezhul,

Everything you're describing sounds very exciting. Mazes are among my favorite teases, and it sounds like you are accounting for the few unique issues typical to maze teases. (like how revisiting the same room becomes boring, if the script is the same every time... it also damages immersion when you the girl does not remember you, even though this is your 3rd time returning to her room) You also address the issue of memorizing the maze, with your procedural generation; but at the same time, allowing players to save and retry the same maze sounds great too. I can't wait to see the finished product!

I voted "I don't care" because unmappable (by your definition) makes no real difference to me.

I don't like dirty tricks, such as truly random mazes where rooms are not logically connected. (i.e., Garden connects to Kitchen, but Kitchen does not connect to Garden; or West from Garden leads to Kitchen, then later you return to the Garden but West leads to the Hall this time, etc.) But it sounds like your definition of unmappable is about potential crossing paths, no truly dirty tricks, so your definition is fine by me.

That said, crossing paths make more sense if the maze has a vertical dimension. Players ascend/descend stairs, to logically explain how certain paths can cross. Just an idea.

Good luck!

-lmind

I feel very strongly that it should be mappable. It's a game and it should be fair to the player. I don't see the point of making it unmappable. My only guesses as to why one would want to do it are:

1. If the player can't write down the map, then the tease will be replayable.
   This is clearly not an issue if you procedurally generate the maze. Also, as a player, even if I knew the layout once, I'd probably forget what it was like two weeks later anyway.
2. Making it less likely to accidentally get to the end in just a few moves on your first try
   If the goal is at least 5 rooms or so away from the starting room and the maze is big enough, then probabilistically, almost all players will take a long time to reach the goal. Who cares if a few of them do reach it quickly? As a gamer, if I would accidentally reach the end quickly, then I would just turn back and go visit some more rooms, because I'd like to see all the content the tease has to offer before I end it.
3. Confusing the player enough so that he will essentially just randomize his moves
   I think this is just bad game design. A random walk will take a very long time to reach the goal, and it usually results in you revisiting the same 5 rooms close to the start over and over instead of reaching any new rooms. The gameplay would be less repetitive, but take roughly as long, if you would just randomize the rooms and remove the maze entirely.
4. It would be too easy/end too quickly otherwise
   This has not been my experience at all. The maze teases I've done here have taken me 5-6 hours, which I think is definitely too long (but people may disagree). First of all, consider that trying to systematically map out the maze carefully comes with a high penalty: you need to revisit rooms and do lots of extra edges as well as spend more time, just to check if one room leads to another room that you already suspected it leads to. Second, even if the maze doesn't have any tunnels or curved corridors, but corridors of different length, it's still pretty hard to map it. I always end up either drawing the rooms too close to eachother, so that I don't have any room to draw new rooms between, or too far from eachother, so that I run out of paper, and I constantly need to throw my drawings away and make new ones.

Is there any other reason? I'm not trying to go on a rant here. I'd like to see it from the other perspective.

There was one tease by 666 called House of Edging, which was played on a perfectly rectangular grid, and each corridor was exactly one room long (it may have had a one-way teleport somewhere, but it was clearly stated to the player when it happened). Therefore it was very easy to map, but I still had to visit pretty much every room because of the way the maze was designed, and I think it worked very well.

My only guesses as to why one would want to do it are:
....
Is there any other reason?

Yes, there is. None of what you described hits the spot. Reasons are:
1) Unconventional mazes with criss-crossing corridors are more easily build
2) I dont really want players to be playing with a pencil and a piece of paper instead of travelling through the maze, noticing the spots they have already been through, and so on.

Nezhul wrote:2) I dont really want players to be playing with a pencil and a piece of paper instead of travelling through the maze, noticing the spots they have already been through, and so on.

Why? And isn't this basically my #3 or possibly #4?