Building Color Echo Maze with Amazon Q CLI
Discover how I built Color Echo Maze, a pulse-based maze exploration game, using Amazon Q CLI to overcome development challenges.
Published May 30, 2025
Watch the gameplay video here:
I've always been fascinated by games that blend exploration with unique visibility mechanics. That passion inspired me to create Color Echo Maze — a pulse-based maze exploration game where players navigate procedurally generated mazes using color-coded pulses to reveal hidden elements. The project was thrilling yet challenging, filled with bugs and design hurdles. Amazon Q CLI became my coding companion throughout this journey, helping me tackle those challenges head-on.
In Color Echo Maze, players find themselves in a mysterious maze where most of the environment is hidden. The key to survival? Emitting pulses of color to reveal different elements:
- Red Pulses expose dangerous traps.
- Green Pulses highlight safe paths.
- Blue Pulses reveal hidden portals to the next level.
Players must manage their energy, triggering pulses strategically while navigating carefully to avoid traps and reach the portal before time runs out. Pulses emit automatically every 4 seconds, but players can manually trigger them for a tactical advantage.
Creating a procedurally generated maze with a guaranteed path to the portal was my first major hurdle. My initial approach often produced unsolvable mazes. I refined it by integrating a Breadth-First Search (BFS) algorithm for path validation:
Designing the pulse visibility mechanic was tricky. I wanted pulses to reveal only specific elements based on their color, with smooth transparency effects. After experimenting and iterating, I implemented a layered drawing system:
Balancing maze complexity and time limits was challenging. I implemented a dynamic system where maze size and time limit scale with the level:
To prevent crashes on systems without audio support, I added error handling for loading sound files:
To ensure the UI scaled across devices, I added dynamic scaling based on screen resolution:
With these challenges solved, Color Echo Maze now offers:
- Procedurally generated mazes that grow in complexity
- Dynamic color pulse visibility mechanics
- Energy management system for pulses
- Multiple wall types: reflective, absorbing, moving
- Time-based challenges that scale with level progression
- Smooth camera movement
- Fullscreen support and resolution-independent UI
- Sound effects for actions and events
Amazon Q CLI felt like having a helpful teammate by my side. It didn’t just provide code snippets — it explained concepts, suggested refactors, and guided me through debugging challenges. Its targeted insights saved me time and helped me understand core concepts like BFS, transparency in Pygame, and dynamic UI scaling.
Color Echo Maze began as a small idea and grew into a complex, feature-rich game. It wouldn’t have been possible without the support and learning I gained from using Amazon Q CLI. For developers facing similar challenges, I highly recommend exploring Amazon Q CLI — it’s more than just a code assistant; it’s a learning companion.
Happy coding and game development!
Made with ❤️ and Amazon Q CLI