Welcome to the Development pages for Manic Maze, follow the step by step process that we used to make the game, as this site was being built during the making of the game we may not have fully accurate beginning processes.

What is Manic Maze
Manic Maze is a basic 2D maze game that is my first project using Dark BASIC, hopefully completing this game will show a way for me to make more games, and hopefully get better at making them.


Date: August 2nd 2005, Manic Maze Begins

After putting it off for many months the re-birth of Manic Maze begins, a bit of background maybe needed for you to fully understand what was happening. During the final weeks of 2004 and the few beginning weeks of 2005, My original PC (AMD Athlon 1GHz w/ 512MB RAM) was starting to play up, It was on this machine that we saw the original "Alpha Screen shots" of our old version of Manic Maze, that never even got to the Demo release. The game was being programmed in DarkBASIC Classic, under Windows XP. For some unknown reason that computer died. I was unable to retrieve ANY of my files, and I was foolish, I didn't back-up any of my files, I lost everything, even my extensive collection of MP3 files!

So after many months of trying to re-cap the love of wanting to make the game again, I worked on mini "test" projects with DarkBASIC Professional on my new system, after MANY successful tests, and a few trips to the DB Forums, I found the urge to make the game again, the planning begins again.

I still had some of my original ideas so that wasn't at a loss, but having to start again was nagging at me.
With the encouragement from a few close friends basic designing begins, I start small, creating the menu items and some basic tile sets, not sure wether or not they will be used, during the design phase, we start working on some "Manic Maze Game Engine Tests", we write two game engines, one in DarkBASIC Classic, the other in DBPro, DB Pro out performed as expected and was chosen as the main language to use.

During this test phase a very primitive version of "Frogger" spawned, it will never get a release however
Frogger / Manic Maze Engine Tests

Early Game Tests, Frogger - Not Planned For Own Release!


After we played about with the game engine for frogger we were thinking of making "Frogger Extreme" but, due to lack of inspiration this game will just remain in source code, we may continue it sometime or make it a game within a game in Manic Maze, the game engine that was used for Frogger is pretty much the same for Manic Maze, only Manic Maze has got a few extra commands.

From the initial start of the project mostly designing has been made, and a very early Menu system has been built a special "Menu Engine" was developed, and required testing, the menu is very image hungry, which also means memory hungry, but thanks to the engine this has been resolved, most of the Menu system shouldn't use anymore then 500KB of memory, this is about the same as a high quality 1024x768 JPEG image.