A while ago I made use of Elfnor’s Sverchok automatic level generator to generate a maze as the next puzzle in my Steely-Taws marble run style game. With a bit of a tweak here and there, trimming other bits, and adding some extra functionality, I came up with a good maze puzzle to add into my game. I promise that it is solvable.

A Tangled Vista. Huh! Solve that!

View through the maze.

The extra functionality includes a “Gondola” and a “Fast Travel” station to teleport between the two ends of the level. The Gondola travels fairly quickly in places and so you will need to watch yourself on some of the corners and when decelerating on the approach to one of the stations. Seatbelts have not been included.

The Gondola

One of the Fast Travel Stations.

You can find earlier editions complete with descriptions of the components and some of the coding on these pages;

Steely Taws – No Quitsies – for the original base level which has been adapted to being the game entry point and puzzle selector.
Steely Taws – Puzzle Game v1 – This introduced the first puzzle to the game and included a number of active components to interact with.
Steely Taws Components – discusses the various active components included in the first puzzle level.
Standardised Steely Taws Components – for the standardised building blocks used in Elfnor’s fabulous automated Sverchok level builder. The level builder makes use of the Sverchok addon for Blender.

These pages also describe getting the game started if you are not familiar with the Blender Game Engine and it’s use.

The Level Selector

A view on puzzle No 1

Downloads

The Blender files were developed on Blender 2.68 and have been successfully tested in Blender 2.75.

Download the Steely Taws Puzzle Game V3 .blend files and textures here (24Mb):

Steely_Taws_V3_Blender268_Models.zip

Brief instructions have been included in the README which can be downloaded here:

Steely_Taws_Puzzle_Game_README.pdf

If you are using the .blend files here is what each one does:

Taws_Puzzle_Selector_v0.blend is the official starting point and will give you a smallish level with access points to the next levels. On completion of a level you will be returned to this level.
Taws_Puzzl_v2.blend will start you straight into the first puzzle. When you complete this you will be sent to the Taws_Puzzle_Selector_v0.blend level where you can look for the access point to the second puzzle (Taws-Puzzl-ElfnorGen1v2.blend).
Taws-Puzzl-ElfnorGen1v2.blend will start you straight into the second puzzle created using Elfnor’s automated Sverchok level builder. Completing this one will drop you back to the Taws_Puzzle_Selector_v0.blend level again.

Windows Executable Version

There is a Windows runtime version of the game available. It can be downloaded from Box.Net using the following link (44Mb): Steely_Taws-Issue3_Windows.zip

Should you wish to check, the md5 checksum for the zip file is:

b2ec4294663bbc7d97dfded0261bcdfc  Steely_Taws-Issue3_Windows.zip

Once you have unzipped the package, you can start the game by clicking on the Steely_Taws-V3.exe file. The game takes a little while to start (or at least it does on my old 2005 Windows machine) and the level transitions can also take some time. No guarantees are given about whether it will work for later versions Windoze.

Components

A zip file with all of the available building-block components has been provided. You can download it using the link below (22Mb).

Steely_Taws_Issue3_Components.zip

Things to do

I would still like to introduce a fly-around camera to allow the player to move the camera clear of the geometry whenever their view is blocked. So far my experiments have not been as successful as I would like.

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Note:

The Steely Taws game and components presented here by Hamish Trolove are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.