spoiler
:amogus:
i was a maze nerd as a kid lol. when the entrance and exit are right next to each other like this, the solution is almost always gonna take you on the longest route possible.
I liked making mazes like this. It was a very chill time. Just lots of loops and islands and weird double-backs to try to confuse the hypothetical maze solver.
what i would do to fuck with people is intentionally not fill space early on. like, i would make the negative space of the early path form complicated, branching dead ends for later paths to plug into. it's confusing for the solver because lots of the terrain around them is actually not at all accessible from where they are. they start thinking they've overlooked something. it's also cool because it makes the most of the space you've got, instead of wasting space on compactly folded dead ends that the solver can see and avoid at a glance. i got kids to give up on perfectly legible, reasonably-sized mazes that were drawn on grid-dot paper 😤
It's been a long time. I hung up my hat years ago. Promised I'd leave that life behind.
lol you get a call at 3 am "we need a maze. there's no one else"
I slowly put the framed photo of my partner, who disappeared in a maze, face down. I glance at a pile of overdue bills gathering dust.
It's the kind of thing you'd need a BASIC program written in 1977 to solve.
