Welcome to Hazel Maze
Hazel Maze is a tablet-based maze game for children. The mazes are a series of hand-drawn images with embedded mazes. The child solves the maze by touching along the path to lead the icon to the finish.
The idea started as a series of mazes drawn by Hazel and mailed to our grand daughters and they mazes turned out to be quite a hit. My daughters had the idea of keeping them in a binder within clear transparencies and dry eraser pens so they could play over and over.
Since they have access to iPads, I decided to write an application that could display the maze and support leading a character through the maze by touching ahead of it.
So, while Hazel has fun drawing new mazes and the grandchildren playing each new maze, I got to have fun learning maze solving algorighms, simple animations and creating a cross-platform application to run on their tablets. It's turning into quite an obsession for both of us and we have a very early version in testing with encouraging results.
We have a couple of features that are in progress, including a method for hinting when the child becomes frustrated and the concept of a 'mystery maze' for the more adventurous. The 'mystery maze' concept is reasonably fleshed out but I expect the hinting model is going to need quite a bit of usability testing.
Finally, we'll need to work through a reasonable model for publishing new mazes if the game proves worth while.
