Unity developer builds custom A* pathfinder for procedurally generated mazes

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Abdul Fahad Shahbaz, a Unity game developer from Lahore, Pakistan, has shared how he implemented a custom A* pathfinding system for a procedurally generated maze game. Because the maze layout is created fresh at runtime each session, Unity's built-in NavMesh system — which requires pre-baked static geometry — was not a viable option. He combined iterative Depth-First Search (DFS) to generate the maze with a custom A* algorithm to navigate it, both working directly on a shared grid data structure. DFS was chosen over alternatives like Prim's algorithm because it produces longer, winding corridors better suited to a time-pressure racing game. Shahbaz published the full C# implementation, including a self-contained AStarPathfinder class, on DEV Community for other developers to reuse in their own Unity projects.

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