A maze thing!

This bookmark is inspired by the classic Pac-Man game, a little project I started back in mid-2021 and that’s finally ready for easy, fully customisable use.

With this model you can generate random maps, apply symmetry, add elements, and personalise it with your own text, turning every bookmark into something truly unique.

A bit of history

Using Glyphs (a professional font-design app), I quickly created a font containing all the tiles needed to build the maze: walls, corridors, characters and all the tiny details. By turning each graphic element into a character, designing or decoding a bookmark became as easy as reading a text string.

Since all the elements are micro-sized, I had to make physical samples to test them, tweak shapes and fix details until everything looked right. For example, I had to redesign the ghosts’ eyes to make them much bigger so that, once engraved, they’d match the apparent size of the corridor dots.

For a long time, I had several handmade prototypes (built tile by tile in the design software) hidden away in a drawer... until recently. Over the last few weeks, and with a bit of help from ChatGPT, I finally sat down to code a full JavaScript map generator with a simple, friendly interface anyone can use.

From this generator you can design your own maze, add custom text, drop in characters or elements, and instantly preview how everything looks.

Before you start

Take a moment to decide what text you want to add: as soon as you start typing, the system generates random maps. So if you change the text later, you’ll lose the edits you’ve already made! You can add text at the top and bottom, and choose between two pixel-style fonts.

Once your text is set, you can generate new maps with different symmetries. Then you can turn corridors into walls (and vice versa) just by clicking anywhere on the maze. To add elements, simply select one and click where you want it to appear.