Dino Escape!

GAME BACKSTORY

You have been accidentally cast millions of years into the past by a time portal you stumbled upon while on safari in the heart of Africa. Dinosaurs are all around you, looking for a hearty snack! Fortunately, your well-armed safari jeep was cast back in time with you -- use it to escape from the dinosaurs and head toward the glowing time portal you can see several miles away. Pick up 10 crystals along the way that will give the time portal enough power to return you to the present! But watch out for rocks and logs in your path -- take too much damage and your jeep will explode, killing you and preventing you from EVER getting home!

DEVELOPMENT

Dino Escape took shape as a sort of amalgam between the Sega Genesis version of Jurassic Park and the classic Capcom arcade game 1942. We wanted to make something that was hectic, challenging, fast and fun that provided that old-school arcade experience. This meant, from the beginning, that we knew the elements we wanted: top-down perspective, heat-seeking enemy AI, randomly-generated obstacles, and agile player controls to get out of sticky situations.

Jurassic Park for the NES 1942 arcade game

Our progress took a hit early on when our original fifth team member had to drop the course. He had initially been responsible for the game's music and sound effects, and with his departure that workload was taken over by Brandon. As per the assignment, we spread our development goals out over several objectives to ensure that we finished on time. Janitor Squad kept up with these objectives, for the most part, though some challenges arose that had to be dealt with near the end of the process. Original development objectives and timeline are laid out below:

24 January - implement basic background scrolling and control scheme

29 January - add background, obstacle and player art, initial soundtrack, obstacles, implement collision detect

1 February - add menu screen, enemy art and AI, damage mechanic

8 February - add menu art, powerup mechanic and art, and effects (explosions etc.)

12 February - add final soundtrack and sound effects, any unfinished elements, thorough play test

One major hurdle in the latter stage of the project was trying to integrate our gameplay functions into a more robust set of screen management classes. We adapted an example project from the XNA website to suit our purposes. Because of the extra time involved with game state management, we had to nix power-ups, which weren't a heavily favored feature to begin with. Sam was able to create a diverse range of particle effects that far exceeded anything we had set goals for, with different results for wood, stone and dinosaur collisions.