3D Mazes!

Literal 3D maze game that utilizes vertical paths as well in addition to the typical 2d mazes drawn on paper! I don't mean a 2d maze with high walls to make it look realistic or harder to navigate, I mean mazes with paths that actually fork off into all 6 possible directions! Each level is like it's own 2d maze, with vertical paths connecting random levels to each other as well! This version online comes the closest to what I'm talking about:

https://www.chrisraff.com/3d-maze/

Imagine a 10x10x10 cubic maze where the entrance is on level 2 and the exit is on level 5, and you not only have to find your way through the maze of whatever level your on, but the only path to escape involves you visiting certain levels in a specific order, like maybe you enter on level 2, have to navigate through that 2nd floor maze to find the correct vertical path that leads to level 7, get off at 7, then navigate the maze there to find the only vertical path that leads to level 4, then navigate the 4th floor maze to find the vertical path that leads to level 9, and repeat to find the one that finally goes to 7, where navigating that one correctly will take you to the exit. Imagine something like that. And of course with random vertical paths that take you to levels with nothing but dead ends, or even multiple vertical paths that connect the same two levels but one leads to all dead ends on the destination level while the other leads you to the exit! Wouldn't that be a cool game?

I'd definitely want to see this become a reality!

a 3d maze? I think that's already a thing...

Personally, I've never heard of it...

Question is, if this would be a video game (assuming you don't mean this IRL), would the vertical switching vertically switch gravity? Otherwise, I can see vertical traversal being difficult to make feel smooth in game dev- possibly copy Mario Galaxy gravity physics-

This would be one of the simplest games ever to code and create, teach yourself coding and try to make it, you might surprised that you can do it

I tried to build one myself in the game "SurvivalCraft":

I memorized the route through but it gets really hard to not get lost when building all the false paths cause you lose track of what you are doing in seconds when digging paths in 3D! (Basically I just set the terrain to be all glasscubes so it would be transparent and then made the walkways a different block otherwise even just walking through it would be like a house of mirrors). Here's some other images similar to what I mean by a "literal" 3d maze:

This would be a simple task in a dedicated pro game development platform like unity

You could temporarily use different mesh/colors for false paths to keep track of them, for example

Ah, I see- honestly, pretty good idea, although I feel I would be terrible at solving it-

By the way with this online game you can set the dinensions to 12x12x12! Hardest I've found my way out so far is 5x5x5, and got lost like 10 times, although I bet they could make the paths even more complicated!

https://www.chrisraff.com/3d-maze/

I am not a professional coder, but I've taught myself and made some things for fun. I fully believe that anyone in this thread can learn it and teach themselves if you commit, find the right resources, and just do it. It's not as hard as it seems at first.

True, although the multiple level false paths compounds on itself making it 1,000x more complicated! For example, let's say on a simpler 10x10x3 maze, there's exactly one path in and out. Let's assume each level itself is a 2d maze, but with various numbers of vertical paths connecting the following:

Level 1 to Level 2: 5 Paths

Level 1 to Level 3: 2 Paths

Level 2 to Level 3: 3 Paths

And the correct one involves going from levels 1 > 3 > 1 >2 to get out, not only do you have to figure out which levels you have to go to in which specific order, there might be multiple paths that take you between any 2 levels, but only one is the correct route, the others may all end up in dead ends after 2 more level changes, which you'd then have to backtrack all the way. Now imagine the number of possible combinations with 10x10x10, thousands of possible paths with up to 15+ times having to change levels, finding the correct vertical paths each time, in addition to navigating the 2d maze on each level.

I used to dabble in python, unity, and blender, but I think I could only realistically use the latter one, and not very well- still, I second #16's statement- I only did it to impress someone I was into at the time 😅

I've tried to understand how maze generating algorithms work and it's too complicated for me lol, it involves something like random turn values to generate the extra paths..etc, the wiki page on ot blew me away. It's easy to build a 2d maze by making a path with alot of turns, marking it, and then building all the splits and forks and dead ends from that random path, then removing the markers for the actual path, but programming it is a different story.