Senior Project! Argg!

So this weekend, I had to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on my senior project. I've been brewing this idea in my head for quite some time, and now it's time to implement.

The idea is called maze/break. The point of maze/break is to solve a randomly generated maze as fast as possible. That sounds simple, and probably not worthy of a senior project idea, but it goes well behind just that. At OIT, our senior projects are required to contain a networking element and some sort of database interaction in order for it to be acceptable.

I've decided that my networking element will come in the form of a "ghosted opponent". The idea came from a great website that I used to frequent by the name of tetrisfriends.com. tetrisfriends.com is a multiplayer, ranked Tetris website. For months, I played on tetrisfriends.com thinking that it had near-perfect matchmaking and that there always seemed to be people playing. The reality is that you only play against ghosts. What are ghosts? Well, in its most basic form, a ghost is a replay. It's a recording of someone else's previous actions. So with tetrisfriends.com, and subsequently maze/break, when you choose to play multiplayer, you are actually racing against some one else's previously raced maze!

There are some issues with this system that I will elaborate on when the time comes, but for now I just wanted to provide an introduction to my project. I'll be chronicling the development as much as I can.


As a project, this will present a load of challenges for me. I've chosen to use Microsoft's XNA Framework to make the graphic elements a bit easier for me, but in doing so, I've also chosen to use c# to which I, in fact, have very very limited previous exposure. Not only that, but I have never written anything heavily graphics-oriented. So good luck to me!