Maze Generator
Most mazes go from one edge to another. An inner room turns the maze inward: a rectangular chamber in the centre with a single doorway, so the puzzle becomes reaching the middle or escaping from it.
How the room is made
Switch on the inner room and choose its width and height in cells. The generator marks the cells inside that rectangle as room, removes them from the maze, and draws a solid wall around them. It then chooses one corridor cell that touches the room and opens the wall between them; that is the door. Everything else in the maze is built as usual around the room. On a polar (circular) maze the room is the centre few rings instead of a rectangle.
Start outside or inside
With the start set to top or bottom, the entrance is on the outer edge and the exit is the doorway into the room. With the start set to the inner room, the door is the entrance and the exit is on the bottom edge. Both are the same maze; only which end you begin from changes, and that changes the feel more than you might expect, because dead ends near the start are the ones that cost time.
Room size
The room needs to leave at least two cells of corridor on each side, so the maximum is the maze size minus four. A room about a third of the maze's width and a quarter of its height looks balanced. Very large rooms turn the maze into a ring, which is fine for a border design around a picture or text.
Uses
- Treasure maps: draw or paste a picture into the room after export.
- Invitations and cards: put the message inside the room.
- Escape puzzles: start in the room; the story is that the player wakes up in a locked chamber.
- Logos: a small maze with a room holding a letter makes a distinctive mark.
Editing the exported file
The room is an empty area in the SVG, so anything you add in a vector editor or word processor sits cleanly inside it. If you need the room's exact position, its walls are the only long unbroken lines in the middle of the drawing and are easy to select.