The overall concept of my game was that of a thief escaping the room without being caught by the policemen who are moving back and forth in the room. The objective of the room is to escape the police and the room. The first thing that came to my mind when I heard the word escape was being trapped in a room as well as a thief running from the police. At first I had only incorporated the room aspect of the escape theme and after discussing my game idea in class, I also found a way to incorporate the thief-police aspect into my game.

I started off with the idea of having only two policemen in the room who are moving back and forth. There will be walls in the room which the thief can use to hide from them. Also, the field of vision of the police was supposed to be more than just the direction in which they are moving. I had planned on making invisible boxes and if the thief and police are in the same box then the player would get caught and the game would restart. However, the code got too complicated for my level and I was not able to implement the invisible boxes. Without the invisible boxes, the walls would not make much sense and therefore I decided to change the idea to what it is now. Now there are 7 policemen moving back and forth the room and if the player collides with the police, the game will restart. All the police officers are moving at different speeds to make the game more challenging. Also, I have programmed them to have them alternating speed (for example, the first one is slower, the second one is faster, the third one is slower and so on). Because of this, escaping the police becomes much more challenging. Another obstacle is that the speed of the player is much slower than the speed of the policemen so it is much more difficult to escape from them if you choose the wrong time to start moving downwards. So, even though there are not a lot of visible obstacles in the game, I have tried to make it difficult by including such challenges.

While I was not able to implement my original plan, I felt happy about the final product. When people were playing it in class today, it was nice to see the anxiety building up towards the end of the game which I had intended to happen (with the increasing speed of the policemen). Also, the game did not seem very easy to most people but after a few games, they got used to the controls and were able to finish the game. Therefore, I felt that the game was not very difficult and not very easy.

With more time I probably would have been able to implement the original plan. In fact, in this game I could have figured out how to implement the field of vision code which I could not figure out how to make it work at the moment.

Since Escape the Police is a video game, it can be considered a material, software and cultural artifact at the same time. It is also a cultural artifact because it reflects the social idea of a thief escaping from the police. Whenever we think of a thief, we always think of the relation of a thief with the police as the thief escaping the police.

Here is the link to my code:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/170X1Q2XDHJPPXh8c_TfWIY3kuLAqq2TR?usp=sharing