Maze Farmer! | Shamus Donaldson Portfolio

Maze Farmer!

Platform:

Mobile - App Store, Google Play

Engine:

Unity

Language:

Team Size:

Overview

Maze Farmer! is a kid-friendly mobile puzzle game where players guide animals through 100 colorful maze levels, collecting crops and earning coins along the way. Players tap the screen to move their character, navigating increasingly complex paths while trying to gather as many crops as possible before reaching the goal.

Coins earned in each level can be spent in the in-game store to unlock new playable animals. With one-touch controls, simple progression, and a cheerful visual style, Maze Farmer! was designed to be fun, accessible, and rewarding for younger audiences, while reinforcing light puzzle-solving and spatial awareness.

Project Design Goals

Maze Farmer! was a solo project created to explore and expand my technical and UX/UI design skills in Unity. My specific goals included:

Refining tap-based controls and player movement systems tailored for mobile touch interfaces
Implementing scalable UI layouts that adjust cleanly across various screen sizes and device aspect ratios
Building a functional in-game store with unlockable content and a coin-based currency system
Creating a character selection system that loads the chosen animal from a separate scene
Saving player progress and preferences using PlayerPrefs (e.g., unlocked characters, selected animal)
Structuring the project to support 100 handcrafted levels with increasing challenge and variety

This project served as both a polished, player-friendly mobile experience and a technical sandbox for testing key systems used in mobile game development.

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Post-Mortem

Maze Farmer! was both a polished mobile project and a learning-focused prototype designed to deepen my understanding of mobile-friendly UI, tap-based controls, and persistent player data. The project helped me solidify several key Unity workflows while delivering a complete and accessible game loop for young audiences.

What Went Well

Touch Controls Felt Natural: Simple tap-to-move input worked well across devices and was easy for kids to understand, resulting in smooth early playtests.
In-Game Store Functionality: I successfully implemented a coin economy and a functioning in-game store, allowing players to unlock new animals through earned currency.
Character Selection System: Building a scene-based selection system and having it persist across gameplay scenes helped clarify how to manage cross-scene communication and player preferences.
UI Scalability: I learned how to set anchors and layout groups effectively, ensuring the UI maintained usability across a wide range of screen sizes.

Challenges

Content Creation at Scale: Designing 100 unique mazes manually was time-intensive. Midway through development, I had to streamline my level-building workflow and reuse modular patterns to speed up production.
Storing Progress Reliably: Implementing PlayerPrefs for saving unlocks and selections was straightforward, but organizing the data structure cleanly for scale took additional iteration.
Balancing Simplicity vs. Challenge: Since the game was built for a younger audience, finding the right level of difficulty across 100 levels required ongoing adjustment.

What I’d Do Differently

Implement a basic level editor to accelerate maze creation and testing.
Explore more visually engaging reward feedback (e.g., animations or audio cues when coins are collected or new animals are unlocked).
Add basic tutorials or tooltips to help new players understand the store and character selection systems more intuitively.

Final Thoughts

Maze Farmer! reinforced the importance of building scalable UI, managing persistent data, and balancing scope when targeting younger audiences. It also helped me better understand how to design systems that feel complete and polished—without overextending production time. The game served as a strong technical milestone and a fun, playable experience in my portfolio.