JavaScript: Random Maze Generator

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2021-07-16 13:30:05

This is a basic version which will create a maze of the specified dimensions, with an entrance, exit, and a cunningly placed key to be retrieved en route. You can find a more advanced version linked below.

Below you should see a randomly generated maze with 16 columns and 12 rows. This maze is not interactive, but can be made so by subsequently applying our Maze Game code presented earlier. There are also no monsters or treasure.

Unlike our earlier examples which used PHP, this maze is generated entirely in your browser, so you can (re-)generate mazes to your heart's content:

Please note that we've written the MazeBuilder class using ES6 class notation, meaning that it may not work in some older browsers.

The constructor() creates an empty matrix which is then walled (Figure 1) and partitioned (Figure 2) according to the recursive division algorithm which you can find details of under References below.

Placing the key with placeKey() is the most complicated part of the code as we first traverse the maze from both the start point and the end point with countSteps() and use that to calculate where the key should go to be as far away as possible from both those points (Figure 3).