Show HN: Virtual Corn Maze | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Virtual Corn Maze

noisyowl.com

29 pointsjtolmar28 comments

My friends and I have a tradition of visiting a corn maze every Halloween season, but can't this year due to quarantine, so I made this. Now that we've all had our corn maze gathering, I'm sharing it with the rest of the world. I recommend picking a specific time and going with a bunch of friends while also on voice/video chat.

Also happy to answer questions about the implementation here.

Shoutouts to whoever named themselves "<b>corn</b>", that's a much kinder way than usual to probe at whether I have HTML injection vulnerabilities.

edit: Un-shoutouts to whoever named themselves a racial slur. If you experienced a network outage and the maze re-randomizing, that's because I had to reboot the server to add an admin panel.

Is the perspective artistically intentional? It feels like there's a lot of distortion at the edges of the screen. Sort of nostalgic, but also a bit dizzying.

I'm going to pretend it was artistic.

In truth, I did it from memory and my first guess was close enough that I didn't feel like sitting down and working out the math correctly.

I'm sorry if it's making you nauseous.

It's okay! It's not severe, and it gives character to the game.

Perhaps you can split the blocks in two or four before rendering them to reduce the distortion.

True story - I proposed to my (now) wife in a "haunted" corn maze right after the chainsaw guy started chasing us. I knelt on one knee but she didn't know what I was doing and she started dragging me with her as she ran because she was so scared of the chainsaw guy. Random people kinda re-aimed her and she realized what I was doing.

Was this planned by you or did you just randomly get the idea "Jesus, if I would be really murdered right now by a psychopath with a chainsaw I couldn't imagine a better woman to painfully die beside me"?

That's touching.

Weirdly enough, I've gotten multiple requests to put a chainsaw murderer in my corn maze. Apparently the current surprises aren't enough.

This is very fun and creative, although I did start getting a bit disoriented and had to exit after a few minutes.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip!

Missed opportunity for the Maize Maze joke.

Cool! It might be fun to show, at the end, the path you took through the maze on a map.

I like that you can just go back out the entrance and walk around to the finish line

Have you considered making a maze that can not be solved by the follow-the-left-wall or follow-the-right-wall strategies?

I think it'd be fun to send anyone following one of those into an inescapable large loop of some kind.

Have you tried it? Because you're very likely to get stuck ;).

If you strictly follow a wall from the start (or any of the checkpoints), you'll find your way to the end. However, most walls are on loops. The style of maze I used is called a braid maze, and replaces all dead-ends with loops. (The maze algorithm considers a 2x2 square a loop though, while the renderer doesn't fill anything in the center, so those still look like dead ends.)

I did, I followed the right wall all the way (I think, unless I made a mistake).

It's possible, just uncommon! Congrats, you're uncommonly good at wall-following.

I think a cool upgrade would be to make what I did impossible.

[Hi from Argentina!] I found a signal say 1/4, what does it mean?

Hi from the US!

It means you're one quarter of the way through the maze.

I found "Halfway" now. :) I'll try to continue later.

Can you add some crows so I can scare them? (Put them in a random position, and when someone finds them they fly away and everybody see them. They respawn later...)

What about some random rocks in the floor to make the path more different? (Or the idea is to make the floor as equal as possible?)

Footsteps that disappear after a few seconds?

I really like the crows idea!

Footprints are more or less impossible with this kind of rendering.

I'd like more variety and decoration in the maze, but ran out of time. Perhaps an update next year. I was considering upgrading for Wolfenstein-era rendering to Doom-era rendering next year, so that'd also let me do stuff on the floor like footprints.

Finished! :)

Left hand path seems to be the fastest way to solve this.

Nice. Do the scare crows do anything?

Those are the other players! You were the scarecrows all along!

Now I wonder if that true IRL!

Awesome.

Spoiler: Press 'm' for a clue.

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