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3D Viper Maze
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About the game
3D Viper Maze puts you inside a maze, seen through your own eyes. The corridors are drawn in perspective, up to six squares deep, with brick walls in warm shades of orange and yellow. You walk one square at a time and turn in steps of a quarter, and the job in every maze is the same: find the exit.
The mazes are not random. Each one was designed by hand, and they get harder as you go. Along the way there are coins to pick up, buttons that open and close passages somewhere else in the maze, a few secret areas that the map keeps quiet about, and vipers waiting in the corridors. Get too close to a viper and it strikes; you are sent back to the start of the maze and the death is counted.
There are three short training mazes and five real ones. After each exit, a results screen shows how many times you died, how many of the maze's coins you found and how many of its secret areas you entered.
Playing it here
This is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a small virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it today. 3D Viper Maze targets XO-CHIP, a modern extension that adds colour and better sound, and borrows the large sprites of SUPER-CHIP. It was made for Octojam 7, a yearly CHIP-8 game jam. It runs here in the Octo emulator, with the speed and colours the author chose for his own web version.
Click Play and press any key to get through the title and the two introduction screens. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too: the D-pad walks and turns, and B opens the map.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| W or up arrow | step forward |
| S or down arrow | step back, without turning |
| A or left arrow / D or right arrow | turn left / right |
| 1 or Q | open the map; press again to close it |
| A / D (results screen) | replay the maze / go on to the next one |
| Any key | leave the title and picture screens |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
One press, one move. The game waits for you to let go of the key before it takes the next step or turn, so walk with taps rather than holding a key down.
Use the map. The map shows the whole maze from above, with a blinking mark for where you are and which way you face, and the exit. Buttons and vipers only appear on it once you have run into them, and coins and secret passages never do, so those you have to find by looking around.
Buttons change the maze. When a message says the walls moved, a passage has opened (or closed) somewhere else. The map shows the new layout.
Look ahead. A viper one square away is deadly, and so is one two squares straight ahead of you. Watch the end of the corridor before you walk down it.
Credits and licence
3D Viper Maze was created by Tim Franssen, known as Timendus, who drew all the pixel art and wrote the music. It is his tribute to a famous 3D maze game for the Sinclair ZX81 from 1981, 3D Monster Maze, with handcrafted levels in place of random ones. In the project's notes he thanks John Earnest for help with Octo, mirandavdende for help with the level design and srekke for musical inspiration.
The game is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3. It runs here in Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator by John Earnest (MIT licence). The licence text and the complete source code are linked from this page.