Hello everybody!

Yesterday was a big day for us. It was the day our class’s playable builds are due; Desperate Escape is no exception. So, we are happy to announce the beta release of Desperate Escape! We built this game for University of Central Florida’s AI for Game Programming class (CAP4053).

You can play or download the game here or at the bottom of this post. We also want to hear feedback from you guys when trying this game out. If you can fill out this survey before April 13, that will be great. We can adjust our game according to your feedback before the final build is due on April 27.

A Brief History

Before we started building this game, we were just regular students trying to get out of waitlist for CAP4053. Teams were not formed at the time yet. That happened like 1-2 weeks after the class registration deadline passed. During this period, we were forming teams using our class’s Slack workspace. Leo Zhang formed Team 8 with me, Charlie Levine, and another student. We planned to make a top-down stealth game as Leo was inspired by the Metal Gear Solid series.

Unfortunately after our first presentation, the fourth student dropped out of class because she wanted to focus on her marriage and her core classes. This brought our team size down to three.

How do I shot web?

We started building this game using Unity as our game engine and Perforce as our version control system (VCS). None of us had used either software before, so learning how to use them was a struggle. Especially Perforce. That software was complicated. At least until Nick LaCognata, the class’s teaching assistant, showed us how to use it during our free time. Without his help, we would be struggling to get Perforce working for more weeks! Although, because Perforce is a VCS, I noticed how similar it is to Git. Both VCS’s use different terminology and handle workspaces differently. Once I took note of the similarities despite using different terminology, I was able to help Leo and Charlie resolve Perforce issues.

Unity is another story. Personally, all it took for me to get comfortable with Unity is playing around with the editor. I find their features pretty straight forward. I think Leo watched Unity tutorials before he got himself comfortable, too. That was when we started working on our own workspaces adding features we want to include. We also ran into a bunch of merge conflicts when we routinely pushed our changes to the development branch, so I had to resolve them manually.

What’s next?

We want to hear feedback from you guys, so we can make necessary changes to Desperate Escape before the final build that is due April 27. Until then, enjoy Desperate Escape!