0xDECAFBAD: The Making of Euclidean Crisis

For those who have not heard of Euclidean Crisis…

Euclidean Crisis is a realtime strategy game for the TabletPC. Uniquely, it is designed to be played using solely the tablet stylus and voice command. Euclidean Crisis casts players strategic commanders of a battalion of spacefighters. The goal of the game is the ultimate destruction of the oppositions’ energy Cores. Euclidean Crisis consists of more than 50,000 lines of code and was completed in ten weeks. Euclidean Crisis demonstrates how quickly you can put together a cool game using C#. With the fancy new VS IDE, a lot of the code basically wrote itself.

Doug, Daniel, Travis and I wrote Euclidean Crisis for CS194, the senior project class for CS majors. The class was a toolshed of groups doing web 2.0 social networking modules with AJAX on rails on struts blah blah blah (there were a couple of other cool projects – shout out to Albert’s Bot MMO, in particular). We took in quite a haul with our game. Out of nine awards in the offing at the Faire, we won 1st place for five of them, netting us a brand new XBox 360 from Microsoft, along with other loot.

I’m currently working on packaging up Euclidean Crisis into a downloadable package – it should appear someplace on my website in the next week or two. Creating an install project for this code is difficult because it has a lot of dependencies: .Net 2.0, Managed DirectX, Microsoft Speech API, Tablet Ink API, and some other things.

Doug shouting at our game. “Shut up!” *Nooo. Yoo. Shutt. Dupp.*

For the Software Faire, we had head-to-head games running on an adjacent pair of super-large TabletPC-like devices. Webster, the company that makes the devices may not actually have any engineers. Given how flaky the input system is, it would not surprise me. Here’s a hint dudes – use different radio channels for different pens.

This n00b is about to get pwned.

h3nry, victoriouos~ haX0r The palnnet !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11~~~ AHCK Y0UUUUUuU

Henry beat both Doug and I in succession, on his first attempt ever to play our game. This basically makes him the best Euclidean Crisis player on the planet.

A screenshot of our game. Gold has surrounded his energy Core with a tesla barrier and is setting a group of fighters on patrol. Cyan’s pitiful attack is deflected. I’m working on teaching the computer player to hold back units until it has an sizeable attack force.

What dangers lurk in the nebula?

Euclidean Crisis Google count: 2