Office Escape

Final Presentation This Week

2006-04-23T22:55:00.000-04:00

We're coming to the end of the semester, and also the end of Senior Project. Our game is coming along well, and we're going to be demonstrating the application, our design process, and talking about the other aspects of the group project this Tuesday.

For me (Scott), I think that this project has taught me a lot about becoming familiar with all the different tools I'll be using for a certain project before starting development. We basically developed event handling and looping for our game engine, then got to the SDL graphics part of the project and realized that SDL took care of all that stuff for us. Our data objects that we created were still useful, but the engine was almost a complete rewrite.

If you're on the GVSU campus in Allendale this Tuesday at 10am, come and check out our game. We'll post the application on the web with some sample data sometime soon.

Milestone 2 Goodies

2006-03-24T02:00:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is Milestone #2 for our Senior Project. We have some compilable source code to share, as well as a screenshot.

We're excited to be making progress (slowly but surely) towards our goal!

Important Notes

You will need Visual Studio 2005 with .NET 2.0 to compile and run the source code
There is NO support for this release
This source code is for our CS Senior Project. Phil, Amela, and I are reserving all copyrights on our work.

Revised Schedule, Game Information

2006-03-14T19:51:00.000-05:00

In light of our Milestone #1 meeting, we decided to split some of our bigger tasks in to smaller, easier to grasp tasks. You can see the results in our revised schedule.

In our group meeting today, we came up with some more detailed information about the game engine, and I think that the information will also be interesting to those watching our project. Check out our game information document for some details of the game engine implementation.

Stay tuned for more screenshots before our 2nd Milestone meeting!

Milestone #1

2006-02-25T12:36:00.000-05:00

Our first milestone meeting was yesterday. Throughout the initial development period, we have been realizing that we are using more of an agile development process. Our current gantt chart is not accurate because it needs more "smaller" events occuring in a different order. "Engine Coding" is not nearly specific enough. We probably need to modify that one task to be 4 or 5 tasks.

We will be updating our gantt chart after our group meeting this Tuesday.

So far, this project has already taught us a lot about the development process. We are learning (slowly) that our particular project lends itself to smaller chunks of functionality build around a solid base engine. We hope that we can continue emphasizing flexibility for our design.

Check our Milestone Report #1 for some more information.

First screenshot in action

2006-02-23T17:38:00.000-05:00

Scott sent me a screenshot last night of the basic engine working. I don't remember the legend, something like C = carpet, S = stair, etc. Development is coming along.

Out to lunch

2006-02-07T19:46:00.000-05:00

This is just a reminder that I will be unreachable for the next 5 days as I will not have any access to a computer. Military obligations always seem to come up at inopportune moment. I'll do my best to get back to work come Sunday night, but I will have several classes to catch up in. -Phil

Development Underway

2006-02-02T21:01:00.000-05:00

We have finished up our design document and started development on OfficeEscape. Inside the design document is a proposed schedule for development. Have a look!

Prospectus Posted

2006-01-19T21:07:00.000-05:00

We finished up the prospectus for the game design. It's posted to the right under the "Files" section. Check it out!

Office Escape: An Introduction

2006-01-17T20:01:00.000-05:00

What is Office Escape?
Office Escape is a strategy/puzzle game along the lines of Leisure Suit Larry and NES Zelda. The user explores the Office, trying to escape, and must interact with the environment and solve puzzles along the way.

Why are we creating this game?
This game is being developed as part of a senior project/capstone course for the Computer Science Department at Grand Valley State University. Check out the link on the sidebar for the Capstone course website to get a better description of what we are working on. This weblog is the web presense for the project, and will be updated frequently.

Why aren't there any files available?
The game is in the preliminary stages of development. There is no source code, executables, and we haven't yet even finalized our design documents. Please be patient, there is more to come.