Maze of the Week 3 Redux - Museum of the North (MOTW#160)

January 20, 2025

You may not know this but I have an archive of old mazes that are unlinked from the website. If you don’t know what that means - it means there is no menu option to reach the archive. It includes old pages that were not very popular on the site but still had traffic and so I keep them around. If you click on a search that includes them you can reach the archive or if I give you the link like above. Today’s maze of the Museum of the North in Alaska is part of the archive. The maze is ok. But, as I have found out, people don’t care about mazes of buildings, signs and locations unless they are famous. So I think I did a good job on it, but even if I did a great job….eh. I decided to improve it anyway. It’s good practice. I enjoy the process. This post will be read more than the maze will be sought out. Here is the original post:

Maze of the Week #3 - The University of Alaska Museum of the North

So my MOTW#3 becomes the 3rd maze of the year again 3 years later and officially MOTW #160.

Here are the enhancements I made to improve the maze:

1. Changed the Start/Goal. I changed them from arrows to an internal written Start and Goal.

2. Changed the size. I reduced the height reduced from 8 inches to 5.5 to eliminate empty space, which reduced the lawn and the sky size as a result.

3. Changed the title. The title was reduced from 42 to 28 size, which allowed me to put the title on one line. Then I added the location below.

4. Added textures. I textured the lawn, the walkway/parking lot and the background trees.

5. Added shadows. I added shadows to the front building nook, on the left side of the building, and around/onto the front windows.

6. Fixed the windows. The window panels on the front of the building were fixed (were showing incorrectly in original maze). Minor, but it needed done.

7. Changed outlines. I switched front lawn outline to none (there is no longer a black border for the lawn) and the background trees to no outline. This makes them read more green than green with black outlines.

Let’s see the before and after:

The University of Alaska Museum of the North Maze-min.png

The University of Alaska Museum of the North Maze new changes-1.png

I don’t know quite how to express this, but the end result was minimal changes, but it looks so much better. It looks the same…but at the same time…..not the same at all.

Some data: The new file is 471MB from 49MB.

I will be replacing the archive with the new maze going forward. You can find the maze download there (if you can find the archive) !

If you like this type of content check out all of my case studies:

A Collection of Maze Design Case Studies to Improve your Mazes

Happy maze-ing !

Case Study - Making Maze Art in 3 Different Difficulties

January 16, 2025

I want to take a deeper look on creating mazes at different difficulty levels with a case study. I have looked at this topic before where I discussed ways to change the difficulty level of a maze. Here is some pre-reading if you want some background on the topic:

Maze Design Case Study - Designing a Grid Maze in Different Difficulty levels

Maze Construction - 5 Maze Design Decisions Make All the Difference

This version will take a specific maze and I will make in 3 different difficulty levels. I choose the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Maze (my 2022 maze of the year) to work with, mostly done in black and white to more easily show the work, and zoomed in to focus on the maze portion more than overall picture. The maze is a bit longer and larger than I would like, but it works. All 3 options can be downloaded to make solving easier. The best way to experience and understand this post is to download each maze and try to solve it !

Option 1: Can you tell what difficulty level this is ? Try to solve half way to get an idea.

download

What did you notice ? Hopefully that this maze was relatively easy. Any incorrect branch was short (typically 3 panels) and had no branches off of it. There are no 3 choice blocks in the maze. It is not quite kids maze easy because the maze is too long…but a more compact version of this could be.

Option 2: Same deal. Try it. Go half way or farther this time.

download

What I hoped you noticed was this was a bit more difficult. Now, if you took a wrong branch, that branch also split in 2, so you got deeper into a bad pathway. But, I kept the branches relatively short, so things don’t get out of hand. I consider this medium difficulty.

Option 3: You know this one is the most difficult, so try to solve the entire maze this time.

download

In this maze I used almost all of the full picture and have branches off branches, longer branches, and some long wrong turns. There are also a few places where 3 options are available to move. This could be made even harder, but compared to options 1 & 2 this works.

Now, let’s get under the hood and make this a case study by marking the pathways based on what their purpose is from the designer.

Red - the pathway solution !

Blue - incorrect pathways

Purple - filler pathways that are not reachable by the maze solver

Green - incorrect pathways that branch from incorrect pathways (very wrong turns)

Orange - incorrect pathways added to fill in blank spaces (replaces purple filler in this example)

Option 1 with branches shown

Blue pathways are short (although there are many of them) and none of them branch out. All purple branches are unreachable and filler. This is what an easy maze looks like. You could remove the purple pathways, but it would make the maze look uneven and the pathway more obvious.

Option 2 with branches shown

Same solution, but some of the blue pathways branch out into additional options (shown in green). This is a medium difficulty. I kept the incorrect branches relatively short again. So, blue is a bad path, and green is a very bad path !

Option 3 with branches shown

The hard maze. All purple filler has been replaced and any pathway shown can be reached by the solver. Wrong pathways can be taken for longer (especially if you take the orange pathways at the top of the maze).

So that is 1 maze done in 3 difficulty levels, but all with the SAME correct solution !

So to summarize I used the following to change the difficulty of the maze:

The length of dead ends - How fast you know you have made an incorrect choice
Dead ends with branches - When you make a wrong turn are there multiple incorrect choices on that branch (branches off of branches)
Expanded pathway choices - Some intersections have multiple choices, instead of only 2
Unusable pathways - Filler sometimes was used to fill a maze out while keeping it at the desired difficulty level.
Choices Made - the more choices that need to be made, the more likely the solver makes a mistake.

Let’s look at that last item - choices made - with the same mazes but some data to back it up. In our easy maze example how many choices did the solver have to make ? 85 ! That explains why this wasn’t a kids maze. You would never have a child make that many choices (even an easy maze with 85 is pushing it!). Below I have labeled the 85 instances with yellow circles:

And now our hard version maze. The initial number of choices off of the main branch is actually less than the easy version - 79 (shown counted in yellow again), but those branches also have choices - 121 in fact (shown with aqua circles). So 200 total possible choices. However, the number of choices a solver makes will vary based on which decisions they make off the main branch. You would have to be terrible at solving mazes to make all 200 !

Good luck with your maze designs !

If you like reading content like this check out my master list of case studies:

A Collection of Maze Design Case Studies to Improve Your Mazes

12 Maze Art Ideas : Unlocking Creative Possibilities

What I've Learned Making Mazes

Maze Comic Book Cover #55 - Hop to It!

January 14, 2025

Issue #55 in my comic book cover series is called Hop to It! and features a new maze of a Kangaroo. The background features a bonus maze I made many years ago but never used on the site of a great sign you would find in Australia. My comic book cover mazes can be found in 2 places:

Comic Book Cover Mazes - Year 1 (Issues #1-53)

Comic Book Cover Mazes - Year 2

This the second comic book in the yearly series. I hope you enjoy them !

To receive a book of my first year of comic book book mazes (Volume 1 with mazes #1-53) you can sign up for my book alerts - any time I launch a free maze book, or paid book (on Amazon), I will send you a note about the new book launch.

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Maze of the Week 42 Redux - Sydney Opera House - (MOTW #159)

January 13, 2025

The Sydney Opera House Maze is one of my most popular mazes and one of my earliest. I have been looking wanting to update and improve it for a long time, but I knew it needed a lot of work. Well, I finally went for it and made it into MOTW #159 . Below is the case study showing what changes I made and why. But first, here is the original post for the maze:

Maze of the Week #42 - Sydney Opera House Maze

Here are the enhancements I made to improve the maze:

1. Changed the size. The original size was a very large 27 x 40; I reduced the height to change to 18 x 40 to better reflect the maze size and eliminate empty space. Still large.

2. Changed title font size. It was changed from 40 to 64 but I kept location font the same size so the title is featured vs the location.

3. Changed font color. I changed the titles from black to white based on a change below….

4. Re-oriented the maze. The new size also meant the Opera House would look better by moving it lower on the page and to the right.

5. Extended the building. Previously the building stopped on the right side, but now it more accurately flows off the page on the right side.

6. Added water. I added water with waves so the SOH wasn’t floating on the page any longer (and led to me changing the font color)

7. Added water stain discoloration. The bottom of the sea wall that surrounds the opera house is darker from the water and I added this detail.

8. Changed Start/Goal. I switched to an internal Start and Goal. Create a new maze !

9. New Maze. I switched the location of the start and goal to remove the portions in the base which was too easy and boring. So there is a new maze…actually…

10. 2 Mazes ! Much like the Taj Mahal, the space led to making multiple mazes in the same picture, so you get 2 for 1 mazes now !

11. Color Changed. I changed the color of the roof panels from black to brown to be more accurate - because an even more accurate lighter color does not show maze well enough. I also changed the roof color from white to pearl to be more accurate.

12. Added a reflection. I think any time you can add a reflection in the water, and can do it well, you should do it. It really elevates the maze.

13. Pathway Improvement. I increased pathway width from 3 to 4 (+33% larger) to make solving easier and more enjoyable.

14. Added shadows. Mostly along the roofline and around awnings.

15. Added a shoreline. Because there is one IRL.

So that was a lot. I hope you agree the improvements were worth it ! This is a very large maze so the bigger the screen you use to view it the better !