3D Maze Making

In this blog I will describe how to prepare a 3D maze.  The first step is to decide how many levels and rooms to have.  I usually like to start with a rectangular array of some type.  For this example I will use a 3x3x3 array.  This gives 27 "rooms" to the maze or 3 levels with 9 rooms on each level.  I then draw out rectangles representing the rooms.  After laying out the rooms I draw in the connections between the rooms on a given level.  I try to make the connections in an interesting way.  At this point it is OK if all rooms on a level are not connected.

Now that I have the connections on each of the levels I make the up and down connections.  The first thing I notice is room 20 has no connections, so I know I have to connect room 20 to room 11 on level 2.  Next I start with room 1 on level 1 and work through adding up and down connections until all of the rooms are connected somehow.  Now I have made all of my connections, hopefully I did not miss any rooms.

Next I like to do a graph to see how the rooms are connected.

This verifies that I have used all of the rooms.  It also shows the longest path through the maze from 1 to rooms 22 or 12.  I could leave it connected like this but sometimes I like to add a shortcut path.  It would not be easy to connect room 22 to room 1 but I could connect room 12 to room 3 by adding an up/down connection.  The goal room would probably end up as room 21 or room 20 since those have fairly long paths assuming room 1 as the starting point.

Below is the adjusted connection map of the maze.  If I wanted a more tightly connected maze I could also connect rooms 10 and 12 together.

I would probably use room 20 as the goal room due to it being isolated on level three.  If I am going to make this into a dungeon crawl then I just draw in the rooms and connect with hallways and stairs. You have to be careful to make sure all of the up down connections line up.   If I were going to make this into a castle or house I would look for rooms with lots of connections and make those into hallways.   For example rooms 1, 9, 14 and 23 would likely be hallways that open onto several other rooms.