Summary: Set the junction density and tangle amount, decide whether corridors may bridge over each other, and Puzzle Maker Pro draws a complete hand-drawn tangle maze with its solution — ready for print, PDF or a whole activity book.
Overview
Hand-drawn Mazes produce the looping, over-and-under tangle mazes you see in children’s activity books — without drawing a single line by hand. You set a handful of controls, the generator lays out the corridors, and you get the puzzle and its solution as matching images. This guide walks through creating one, then turning a setting or two into a whole book’s worth of variety.
If you want the solver’s side first — how a tangle maze is actually solved — read How Hand-drawn Mazes Work.
Required Modules
Which edition do I need?
- Hand-drawn Mazes (Standard) makes the maze: junction density and tangle amount, with one opening at each end, and exports it as JPG, PNG, SVG or print PDF (plus Instant Puzzle Books).
- Creative adds the design controls — smoothness, multiple openings and their decoy corridors, the Loops and Tunnels & bridges switches, Border %, and the S/E image room reserve — plus Puzzle Book Studio.
- Productivity adds Time Saver for batch creation and Puzzle Book Studio with multiple puzzle collections in one book.
- Adding Interactive to either one unlocks online play — your mazes played in a browser — and the JSON export behind it. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.
Never used the software? Start with the free demo:
Puzzle Maker Pro Demo.
Preparation
Nothing to prepare — no word lists, no images, no source content. A hand-drawn maze is generated purely
from its settings. Two optional extras:
- Two small images (PNG or JPG) if you want a picture at the start and finish instead of the letters S and E — a mouse and a piece of cheese, a child and a treehouse. (Creative: the reserved corners that give the pictures room are a Creative control.)
- A page size in mind. Set Aspect on the Main tab; it defaults to Square, so a portrait book needs it changed. The maze is drawn to the aspect you choose (Square, Portrait or Landscape) and fitted inside the output image at that aspect rather than stretched to fill it, so the corridors keep their shape. Any leftover space takes the canvas colour — it is margin, not a grey bar.
Open the module and set the density
- Open Puzzle Maker Pro and choose Hand-drawn Mazes from the puzzle menu. On the Main tab, set Junctions. This is a density dial, not a count of junctions: low
values give a wide, sparse maze, high values a dense one. The range is 6 to 144 and the default is 26, which suits a typical book page. - Set Tangle amount (0–100, default 60). Higher values bend the corridors more and produce more over/under crossings; lower values keep the layout calmer.
That is already enough to generate a maze. Everything below is design control.
Coming from another maze module? Two controls you are used to are not on this tab. The path controls — Longest path, Random, Choose endpoints, and right-clicking the preview to place a start and finish — are hidden here, because a tangle’s endpoints belong to the ribbon tips rather than to cells. Complexity is hidden with them: the grid-tangle generator never runs the carver that dial feeds. Junctions, Tangle amount and Smoothness are the three controls that shape this puzzle.
Choose the look (Creative)
Still on the Main tab:
- Smoothness (0–100, default 50) — the curve slider. At 0 the corners stay sketchy and angular; at 100 every corner is rounded into a flowing vector curve.
- Loops (default on) — on gives the braided, wound-up look with more than one possible route. Turn it off for a tree maze: exactly one route from start to finish, dead ends as the only distractors.
- Tunnels & bridges (default on) — on lets corridors pass over and under each other. Turn it off for a flat tangle with no crossings at all, which is much easier for young children.
- Border % (2–10, default 3) — how much clear space surrounds the tangle.
Add decoy openings (Creative)
Set Start openings and End openings (1–4 each, independent). Only one opening on each side is real; every extra one becomes a genuine corridor that threads deep into the maze — even passing under real corridors — and dead-ends without ever reaching the other side.
You do not need to switch decoys on separately: the opening counts drive them. Three start openings means one real entrance and two decoys, every time.
Reserve space for a picture (Creative)
Tick S/E image room and set its size (the box is labelled % of side: 10–20, default 15). The generator keeps the top-left and bottom-right corners clear of corridors, routes the real start and finish path into those clear corners, and sizes whatever marker you have chosen to fill the space — so a picture sits in the maze rather than beside it.
Then, on the Settings tab, switch the markers from Text labels to Images and pick your start and finish pictures.
Shape the maze around a silhouette (Creative)
This is the one place where Hand-drawn Mazes behaves opposite to the other maze modules, so it is worth reading before you use it. In Square or Voronoi mazes a silhouette is a cookie cutter: the maze is trimmed to the outline. Here the silhouette becomes a hole — the tangle flows around it, and the shape is drawn by the corridors themselves.
- Open the Masks tab.
- Click Add built-in … and pick one of the fifteen shipped silhouettes (heart, star, cat, apple, fish, house, crescent and more), or Add … to load your own PNG or JPG. Any image with a clear dark shape on a light or transparent background works.
- Leave Silhouette size at 30 % to start with. It is a ceiling, not a target: the app fits the shape into the maze, keeps a band of clear cells around the edge so the hole never opens onto the page border, and caps how much of the maze the shape may take. Lower it for a small motif in a busy tangle.
- Look at the Junctions box on the Main tab. Loading a silhouette raises its minimum, and a note beside it tells you the number — for example min 110 for the silhouette. That is not a bug: a shape needs a dense enough tangle around it to be recognisable, and a long thin shape needs more than a round one. Clear the silhouette list and your own Junctions value comes straight back.
- Then go above it. The minimum is where the shape is present; it is not where the shape is crisp. Rendering a heart at 81 (its own minimum), 100, 121 and 144 makes this obvious: at 81 it is a rounded blob, and it only reads as a heart from about 120 up. Around 120 junctions is the setting to start from for any shaped maze. Turning the tangle amount down does not help — that was tried, and it makes the outline worse, not better.
- Generate.
Choose a bold shape. Corridors are thick, so the outline is drawn in coarse strokes and there is a limit to the detail that survives. Measured over the shipped set at 121 junctions: heart, cross, diamond and crescent come out unmistakable; cat, apple, star and egg read as rounded rectangles. The same applies to your own artwork — a strong, simple, mostly-convex silhouette works, a detailed one does not. If you are loading a logo, test it before you commit a book to it.
Two things to expect. A shaped maze is easier than an unshaped one at the same Junctions setting, because the silhouette is taking cells the corridors would otherwise have used — so if you are building a graded book, give the shaped rows a higher Junctions value than the plain ones. And “Use silhouette image as background” is not on the tab this shape: a hole has nothing to paint the picture onto. You will find it on the other Irregular Mazes shapes, where the silhouette is the outline the maze is cut to.
Batch tip. Add several silhouettes to the list and turn Round robin off, and you get one maze per shape. In Time Saver, a Hand-drawn row’s image list is that row’s silhouette list — so a row of twenty with four shapes in the list gives you the shapes cycling through the batch.
Set the appearance
- Settings tab — the maze’s own presentation. Four things to set here:
- Show start/end markers — whether they appear at all.
- Start label / End label — default S and E.
- Text labels or Images — which kind of marker to draw.
- Wall width — the thickness of the ribbon outline, and the single control that most changes how drawn the maze looks.
- Dashed solution — whether the answer key prints as a dashed line.
- Door and open-border options do not appear for this module; a tangle has no doorways.
- Style tab — colours: the Markers font row, Background, Floor, the Wall row (the ribbon outline colour), and the Solution colour row (colour and line width). Set the outline width on the Settings tab, not here. The shared workflow is covered in How to Customize Maze Appearance and How to Customize Puzzle Designs.
Set the Title
Titles live on the Layout tab. Smart Titles work the same way in every module, so the how-to is covered once in How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles — what is specific to this module is the list of options. At the default settings a generated maze resolves them like this:
- Maze Shape — e.g. “Maze (Hand-drawn)”
- Maze Shape Size — e.g. “Maze (Hand-drawn 400)”
- Maze Shape Grid Size — e.g. “Maze (Hand-drawn 23 cells)”
- Shape — e.g. “Hand-drawn”
- Shape Size — e.g. “Hand-drawn 400”
- Shape Grid Size — e.g. “Hand-drawn 23 cells”
- Custom — your own text
“Size” is the maze’s bounding area; “Grid Size” is the number of cells in the generated maze, so it moves with the Junctions setting and with each new maze. The same list also fills the Description field, which defaults to “Find the path from the start to the finish.”
Generate and export
- Set the quantity and click create. Each maze is different; the puzzle and its solution are produced as a matching pair.
- Export as JPG, PNG, SVG or PDF (JPG and PNG are either/or; SVG, PDF and HTML are separate checkboxes, so you can take more than one at a time). For print, take SVG : this is true vector, so the corridors stay crisp at any trim size and no DPI question arises — a 6×9 interior and a 8.5×11 worksheet come off the same file. PNG and JPG are raster, so their pixel size matters: set it under Puzzle Size Settings, which takes a size in inches and carries a 300 DPI (commercial print) option. Choose that and the pixel count is worked out for you.
- If the book prints in black and white, leave the canvas and corridor floor white and the walls black. Colour on an interior page pushes a print-on-demand title into a colour plan and changes what it costs you per copy, so the default palette is also the cheap one. Check Wall width too: a dense maze with a hairline outline can break up on cheap paper, so if you are printing 60+ junctions in mono, take the outline a step heavier and print one test page before you commit the title.
- To build a book, send the set to Instant Puzzle Books (Lite) or Puzzle Book Studio (Creative and above): see Puzzle Book Studio Tutorials.
Make a whole book (Productivity)
With Time Saver you set up several rows — each its own settings combination — and generate them in one run. For a graded activity book that usually means one row per difficulty band, for example:
- Easy: 10–14 junctions, tunnels off, one opening each side.
- Medium: around 26 junctions, tunnels on, two start openings.
- Hard: 60+ junctions, high tangle amount, three or four openings on both sides.
Each row carries its own quantity, which is what turns the ladder into a page count. Twenty per row gives sixty mazes. With an answer key for each, that is 120 interior pages before front matter — comfortably past the 24-page minimum a print-on-demand paperback needs. Each Time Saver row shows its junction count in the row summary, so a graded book is easy to read back at a glance. The batch workflow itself is the same everywhere: How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.
Publish your mazes to play online (Interactive)
This section needs the Interactive add-on (Creative Interactive or Productivity Interactive). A plain Creative or Productivity licence does not include online play — it is bought on top of either one.
With it, the same set you just printed can also be played in a browser. Tick HTML in the output formats and Puzzle Maker Pro writes a catalog you upload to the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin; a visitor then traces the maze with a mouse or a fingertip, on your own site.
It behaves the way the paper version does, which is the part that matters for this puzzle style: you drag along one ribbon, and passing beneath a bridge keeps you on your own corridor rather than dumping you onto the one crossing over it. Decoy openings are dead ends there too.
Two useful shapes for the finished catalog, both chosen at export time: a plain dropdown list of puzzles, or a leveled game where mazes unlock in order, progress and stars save in the visitor’s browser, and a finish screen can invite the player to buy the book. A free set of ten easy mazes makes a good taster for a sixty-page one. Full walkthrough: How to Play Puzzles Online.
Outcome
You have a hand-drawn tangle maze with its solution, styled to match your book, titled automatically, and exportable as an image, a vector file or a print-ready PDF — plus a repeatable recipe for turning three settings rows into a full graded activity book, and a browser-playable version of the same set if you want one.
FAQ
Which edition do I need to batch-create hand-drawn mazes?
Productivity — it includes Time Saver, which generates many mazes from several settings rows in one run, and Puzzle Book Studio with multiple puzzle collections in one book.
What formats can I export?
JPG, PNG, SVG and print PDF, for both the puzzle and its solution, plus PDF/PPT books through Instant Puzzle Books or Puzzle Book Studio. With the Interactive add-on you also get HTML output — a set that plays in the browser — and the JSON behind it. Interactive PDF and Puzzle Slides are not part of this module: both are built on cells you type into, which a traced maze does not have.
Can I shape a hand-drawn maze into a silhouette, like a heart or an animal?
Yes, from Creative up — see Shape the maze around a silhouette above. Note that it works the opposite way round from the grid and cell-based maze modules: there the silhouette is the outline the maze is cut to, here it is a hole the tangle flows around, so the shape is drawn by the corridors themselves.
Where are the Complexity and start/end point controls?
Hidden for this module, deliberately. A tangle takes its endpoints from the ribbon tips, so the path controls have nothing to act on, and the generator never runs the carver the Complexity dial feeds. Junctions, Tangle amount and Smoothness are the three controls that change the puzzle.
How do I make one easy enough for a three-year-old?
Set Junctions to its lowest values (6–12), turn Tunnels & bridges off so there are no over/under crossings to read, and keep a single opening at each end. Push Smoothness up from its default of 50 towards 100 as well: rounder corners are easier for a small hand to follow than sketchy angular ones. Everything but the Junctions dial there is a Creative control.
Can I get the same maze again later?
Save your settings as a preset. Re-running the same preset produces mazes in the same style; each generated maze is a new random layout, which is what you want for a book of unique puzzles.