September 19, 2026
Introducing Maze Mechanica, our third game — 1v1 in a brass maze
Maze Mechanica is the third game from FishPunk, and it's in testing now. It is the first one we've made where the other side of the screen is another person: two players share one maze, in real time, and race each other through it.
It began as a maze chase in the old arcade shape — eat the pellets, keep away from what is hunting you — and then grew a second half. You don't drive a dot; you drive a mechanical centipede. Every ten pellets you swallow adds another segment behind your head, and that body is a wall the other player cannot cross. Close a corridor with it and the room is yours. But every segment you gain costs you speed, so the longer you are, the easier you are to catch — and if a rider bites into your body, it slurps the tail off and rides away faster for having eaten it.
The riders themselves are clockwork machines balanced on a single wheel: a cloaked body that pitches forward when it accelerates, leans into its turns and sways while it rides, and, once it's eaten, falls apart so that only the bare wheel wobbles home. There are four of them and they hunt four different ways — one comes head-on, one aims at where you are going rather than where you are, one comes round the other side, and one loses its nerve when you get close.
Power pellets belong to whoever eats them. For those seconds the riders run from that player and are worth points to him alone — and so is the other centipede, which is the single biggest score in the game and costs its owner a life.
A match is at most three games: one on your maze, one on his, and if it's still level, a decider on neutral ground. That way whichever player is running the simulation for a game isn't running it on his own ground the whole match.
The maze itself is built from a Blender kit — brass wall blocks, pipes, seams and bolts — and the camera frames the room you are in rather than the whole level, which is what makes it work on a phone in landscape. There are ten mazes so far, four rooms each.
Maze Mechanica has its own account, username and password only, and no email address anywhere. What that stores, and what happens to your connection during a match, is written out on its privacy page. The game has a page on the site now, with screenshots and the whole cast.
