Crafting: Die Labyrinthmaschine / The Labyrinth Machine

As I have mentioned earlier, this started out as my attempt to make a fully analog mechanical roguelike as well as a second machine for my cardboard arcade. I figure, I can make about one of these things per year – and this one was to be even more videogamey than the pinball I had made in 2018. I took the additional free time that a vacation of my family without me provided to craft this monstrosity:

Now, this probably doesn't tell you much yet. Let's get into the nitty-gritty details of making the Machine.
It started out with me considering how to make a physical labyrinth game with a maze that had more surface than the top side of the game machine itself. A sphere would have been ideal but that I couldn't put axles through. So I created a big drum (25 centimeters diameter and width) and planned a labyrinth on that:

Even making that drum was quite a lot of work: It is made from double-layered cardboard that I sliced open along its ribs (every one of them) in order to make it flex and bend that way. Then I glued packaging paper with the labyrinth onto that curvature. As my math was inexact, I have a labyrinthless strip on the surface but that just serves as the entrance/exit-area. Then it was all about cutting out lots of wall bits. The ones going along the curvature, of course, had to have a curve in themselves as well. This made it a lot of work but finally...

The fist mechanical part was to make a mechanism that would allow you to indirectly rotate the drum inside the box. As I wanted to make it so that a) your direction of movement was equal to the way you spin the knob and b) the speed of movement was not equal to the speed of dialing, gears were necessary. Cardboard gears. Like those:

 Sadly, I have no pictures of the next few steps: I attached the large gear to the drum, built a cardboard case around it all. From the bottom the finished thing looks a bit like that:

The little obstacle in the corridor is the key, by the way. It is connected to an axle leading all the way to the other side of the drum. If you push your player-character-cardboard-tube through it, a door at the exit of the labyrinth opens up. This is one of the two tasks you need to perform in order to finish the game. But more on that later. We can now spin the drum forwards and backwards. How do we do sideways motion in the game? Well, I constructed a rail with two foldable blinds, a lense made from some plastic packaging (attaching a cardboard tube rod that hangs down into the labyrinth, making it impossible to go through walls). The lense can be move along the rail (sideways to the labyrinth) via a belt attached to another twistable knob. The finished thing looks like that:

As you can see, this severely limits the sight range inside the labyrinth, making it much more difficult to navigate. It also means that now you can traverse the labyrinth as if it were a two dimensional surface. The box is around 35 by 40 centimeters in size – the labyrinth has a map surface of 25 by 75 centimeters. Also, thanks to the need to flip that switch in the center (which is located on an 'island' in the maze), you cannot beat it by left- or rightwalling. To make it even more interesting, I added little images of treasures in seven of the corners of the maze. On top of the 'user interface' there are seven latches that you can use to check them off. Gather all the treasure before going to the exit. This forces the player to explore the entire thing.

Now to the sad part: I have yet to find a suitable piece of cardboard for the sides of the thing. I would like it to be set up so the UI does not face up but diagonally towards whoever stands infront of it. Also, the dampness we had in the basement after moving house did some damage to the belt-mechanism of the lense. I may have to redo that thing and I really hated working with that in the first place. I hope I find the will to finish this project. Only two people besides myself have played it to completion yet – and it would be nice to see that number triple some day.

One last thought: If one were a mechanical engineer and had access to a laser cutter for wood, this concept could get amazing games made. Imagine the drum full of gears, levers and switches. Imagine a magnet embedded into the player character rod to trigger events. The possibilities for an analog game would be huge. But this is far beyond the scope at which I can work. Sadly.