- Release 1.0 NOW LIVE! - 1 October 2025
Wow, so this all started a few years back when me and some friends decided, "Dangit, we play enough video games, we should make one ourselves!"And here we are.Midnight Murder Maze is our freshman offering and as such, it is loved for all of its successes as we as shortcomings. We certainly hope you all enjoy it much and we look forward to hearing about your favorite traps and buffs!Thank you with all of my heart to Alex, Eric, Rock, Cass and everyone else who helped support us to this point.Cheers,LazySumo
- 0.6d New Buff!! - 27 September 2025
Hey folks, patch 0.6d here and we're happy to announce that this is our LAST major patch before 1.0 release!!With that being said, here are some patch notes...The good news first. We've had feedback that in larger mazes the run-back after you've died is... painful. OK, the Contessa has heard you and has allowed a Teleporter that takes you to your last death spot. Use carefully and she hopes you all figure out how to use one well. Cheers!Also, we added a few new achievements. Please note that next week on Wednesday we will RESETTING all achievements so that everyone starts fresh.The Contessa didn't feel that the Alarm trap called in hostiles from far enough away. She mentioned something about "Those peasants surviving through my maze" and order the maze masters to fix it.The Discord button was misbehaving. The Contessa had a long, loud talk with it and now it's all betterer.The Alarm haz…
- Patch Notes: 0.6c - 23 September 2025
Happy Fall Everyone!We are one week away from our 1.0 release and our code gnomes are hard at work on polishing and wrapping up last-minute features for you our game-loving fans!Today we have several bug fixes and one new feature! Fixes first...Invulnerability was STILL interfering with other buffs sometimes. So that issue is now resolved. If you think its still broken please let us know.Strange issue where the in-game UI wasn't working, but only in an executable build! Playing from the Unity editor worked fine. The issue came down to improper use of prefabs. Solved.Ambient audio emitters, which are scattered throughout the dungeon, were stopping the lasers from the Omniscience buff?!?! They've been reprimanding and a demerit has gone into their record.Now, the fun stuff...Added slight animation to the status icons so they are more eye-catching.Tracks Buff! Here it is... this buff will…
- 0.6a - Small patch for a few small bugs, more patches coming this week... - 22 September 2025
0.6a Changes:On new install volumes were sometimes set to 0. Setup check for when the game is launched and no values are present. If so, then set them.Recurring issue with the maze config settings not being quite what you had ingame: char model might be incorrect, maze diff might be off, etc. Created sync method at maze launch that double checks settings vs what is about to be built.Discord logo was showing up ingame. While we love Discord... reset the logo to only show up on main as intended.
- Major Update .5a - New Ways to Die, and New Ways to Live! - 20 September 2025
OK, 'patch notes' don't quite cover it, but here we go anyway. Let's start with the good stuff, the things more 'player friendly'. Hehe, sure.New Buffs -n- StuffInvulnerabilityThe Invulnerability does just what it says, for a short while you will trigger no trap OR BUFF and no mobile (wolves, zombies, etc) will track you. In fact, if you are being tracked, this will clear that and let you go on in peace.OmniscienceThe Omniscience buff will show you where all of the hazards are at, at least the non-obvious ones. This is a HUGE buff because sawblades, spears and such become MUCH harder to miss. The hazards icon looks like this...Status IconsCurrently only Invulnerability and Omniscience get status icons, but now the system is in place and making more icons will be easier. They do also show remaining duration via a sweep-style animation.Warning ScreenPlaytesters were getting frustrated by…
- Patch 0.4b Now Live - 4 September 2025
Patch Notes for 0.4b:Noticed that the new performance manager work was impacting the ambient audio from traps and hazards, resolved.Additional performance work: Even if most of the hazards and traps were disabled, the state machines were still running. Implemented a simple boolean guard clause in the machines.Crows were having a tendency to drift off of their origin point, implemented code to keep them at home until they decide to go kill the player. :)
- Patch 0.4a Now Live - 2 September 2025
A couple of minor fixes and one very major one... read on!Save/Load system was not raising the proper success/fail events and causing issues. The system now checks for the status of the save and load functions.The church bells ringing midnight (introduced recently) were ringing each time the player died. No, this isn't Groundhog Murder Maze Day.And now the big one...I have heard that the centuries (100x100 mazes) were really laggy, so I started investigating. Found out that on my build machine those mazes were very inconsistent in performance, sometimes they were nice and smooth, other times very low framerates, below 40fps!Investigation turned up some details...A century will have well over 700 features in it.Each feature had at least 1 and up to 4 colliders as part of it's function.Colliders are expensive, CPU-wise.So the answer was to implement a system where features beyond about 15…
- Entering The Home Stretch! - 29 August 2025
To all the folks in the US, happy Labor Day! Hope you have a good holiday and get plenty of time in front of your Steam backlog!As of this weekend we will be one month away from the release of Midnight Murder Maze 1.0, or our full release. EA has been great because we've heard from lots of our players about how to improve or, better yet, how much fun they've been having!So what will RSS be doing until then? Well, we have a few more polish stories in our backlog, a huge performance pass is part of that, and lots of new traps. I mean lots. We've been analyzing what a player's experience is inside of a maze and what things, what tools the player has to control their run. How does the player learn about the maze, what info is available? Then we've designed hazards to reduce, challenge or outright remove those tools. But, at the same time we're building powerups that can counter those hazard…
- EA Discount Has One Week Left! - 28 August 2025
Quick reminder that our EA discount of 30% has one week left. Midnight Murder Maze will be switching from US $4.89 to US $6.99 as of Thursday, Sept 4th. Now is a great time to grab a torch and jump into a dark, deadly and very, very difficult maze, just to see how many bodies it will take you to find the exit!
- Patch 0.3a now live! - 25 August 2025
Quick note about patch numbers:From now until full release on Oct 1, all patches begin with the number 0Indexes to the right of the decimal increment by week for the number and then by letter for each new patch within a week.Now on to the changes!Maze is supposed to have ambient audio (machine noises, etc) but somehow they weren't working as intended. Now the maze should feel a little more atmosphericSince the word MIDNIGHT is the first word in the title, added the audio of a distant clock striking midnight when you start a run. No purpose other than atmosphereAnalytics changes - App now tracks (if you allow it!) maze starts by size and maze completions by size. Goal is to tell which sizes are most popular and which might be causing the most rage quits. Don't feel bad, as lead dev during testing I rage quit a maze just last week!Crows had an issue with a very slow drift off to the left…
- 0.2c Patch Notes: - 22 August 2025
0.2c Patch Notes: - Updated analytics to include data for the sizes of completed mazes. - Added guard code that ensure that traps/powerups will always spawn for players, even if devs accidentally set them to disabled for testing and release a build with them off.
- LiveStream Incoming!! - 22 August 2025
Had a great time with last night's livestream! As far as I know that was the first time anyone completed a "Century", or a 100x100 maze, so we've got that going for us.May as well do it again! Tonight starting at 6:00 Pacific and running for about two hours or so, we'll be livestreaming yet again! Look forward to seeing everyone.
- Watch The Devs Livestream This! - 21 August 2025
Tonight at 5:00 Pacific the dev's will be online streaming them playing the game. Why should you watch? Well, besides getting a good taste of the game you'll learn that we die just as often and just as stupidly and anything you might do. :)Seriously, this game is HARD!Also, tonight will be the first streamed attempt at what we call a Century, or a 100x100 maze. Lots of territory, TONS of traps and just a few, scattered powerups. Oof.
- Midnight Murder Maze Enters Early Access!! - 21 August 2025
After a year in development we are absolutely THRILLED to announce that our freshman offering, Midnight Murder Maze is releasing into Early Access today!Whew, this is a huge day for us here at Rum Shack Studios for many reasons, let me list a few...We've been working on this title for almost a year. Originally it was conceived as an entry into Spooky 2D Jam 2024 (the cool kids running it, Theo and Chloe, are running another one this year!)As our freshman title we certainly focused on building our game dev skills, but this past year was as much about building RS as an actual company. One with adult-ish things like incorporation, bank accounts, logos, and other such stuff.We matured our overall workflow across our entire dev-ops cycle.We know how to sling us some code, baby!! (Oh lordy, our early code now looks soooo bad in comparison!)We've learned that Unity scenes aren't all that.And w…
- Midnight Murder Maze ver 0.2b - 21 August 2025
Thanks to all of our testers and of course our own Rum Shack team but this is the final update before EARLY ACCESS!!Updates to the achievement system require a reset of all achievements. Apologies, but all things considered, this is necessary.Various tweaks and improvements to the UI
- Patch to Ver .2a - 15 August 2025
Patch to .2a includes the following:All powerups now save their states when the player saves the game and restore accurately.Maze start transition screen was not full screen width.Player jumping function was causing issues with movement and triggering of both traps and powerups. Currently there is no real reason to be jumping (yet!) so disabled the function for now.Player could lead zombies back to start which caused immediate death on respawn. Now player respawns with temp immunity. Duration of the immunity scales inversely with difficulty.We now have the ability to reset all player's achievements and stats via code.PLEASE NOTE: Expect us to reset stats and achievements prior to 1.0 release!As always, thank you for your patience as we learn our way through the mechanics of code, development and Steam. Ping us here or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/CF3eZEFGZdCheers!LazySumo
- Patch to Version 0.1d - 12 August 2025
Patch to Ver 0.1d includes the following fixes:Wolf was missing animation transition which caused issues when the player ran past the wolf from behind.Zombie was not resetting back to Idle state after player diedAdded triggers for achievements based on picking up any powerup and completing any mazeCompass was not saving correctly. NOTE: While this issue is partially resolved, there is still work with all three powerups to ensure that they save/load accurately.As always, please shoot us any details about possible bugs/issues and general jank. While we appreciate some jank, we want as much out of this project as possible. :)Cheers, LazySumo
- First Patch! - 8 August 2025
VERY short patch to adjust the balance between traps and powerups. Initially this was set at 50/50 regardless of difficulty level. Now at difficulty 1 the balance is still 50/50, but by the time you are at difficulty 5 it has dropped to 90% traps vs 10% powerups.New patch coming next week with several items off of our backlog. We'll have notes then. Cheers!
