I am a developer of a game that’s round based, and has a maze with randomly disappearing walls, which the player has to get through in order to win. Basically “Hedge Way Out” from Epic Minigames. There are hazards to avoid, and they do a variety of things to stop you from escaping the maze, and there’s ice cream to collect, hidden around the maze, it’s the main currency of the game. If you want to see what it’s like, here’s the game.
I’ve been told that the game gets boring after a couple minutes, it’s not engaging enough to keep players. I can see why it gets boring; the player does not have a lot of control over what happens, there’s also not a whole lot of motivation to win.
What do you want to achieve? I want to make my game more engaging.
What is the issue? There’s not many ways I can think of to make it less boring.
What solutions have you thought of so far? I can’t really give the player control, since the entire concept is walls randomly disappearing, and I tried asking others how to make it not so boring.
I have been thinking about quests to do, because it’d be a great motivation to play the game more, but I’m not sure if quests alone will do the trick.
In my opinion, I think you could add some sort of map voting system into the game as it would engage players a bit more and spice up the game.
I think you can slightly change the concept of the game by not just doing maze escapes but rather something similar like having game-modes such as battle royales or a king of the hill kind of minigame.
An addition is to add secret stages like having portals spawn around the map and you come out of a random one. Secret stages will enhance gameplay a lot as players will often try to seek them, resulting in more gameplay.
You’ve got the makings of a great game here. I’m impressed by the quality of many of the elements – the music and the tutorial to name a couple.
Making it more engaging is a challenge for sure and an issue I think we all struggle with. A couple of suggestions might be:
With the camera so high up from your character, it loses some “personal” attachment. I don’t really feel like it’s me stuck in a maze.
Maybe there can be a reason to be stuck in the maze and a reason to want to escape. Maybe a little backstory and some scenery that supports it (e.g. a dungeon).
Also, here’s a few critiques I’d like to mention:
A lot of the time I felt I was stuck inside of one square, waiting for over 10 seconds for one of the walls to disappear. That got old, fast.
Unless I missed something, are you forced into the next game regardless of where you are in the lobby? I felt like I was under pressure exploring your nicely made lobby before the intermission timer ran out.