An escape room for developer teams

02 Mar 2021

I can’t help it: I have an insatiable desire to program computers to do things. My latest hobby project pretty much assumes that others do, too.

In response to covid-imposed remoteness, seeing dev teams struggle with coherence and the strain that teams get subjected to in such circumstances, I built a thing. I’d had the idea for a little while, and I might well have missed the boat here (lockdown has been full on, my coding time limited), but hey. Building it was fun anyways.

The thing, in this case, is /dev/esc. I wrote all the copy there so you can go and find out more. I hope it offers something that a team of developers can play together, that’s a bit more interesting than gaming, or a complement to/contrast with paintballing, karting or beers.

It was a lot of fun, but also quite a challenge, thinking up puzzles that offer up rewards at just the right rate, scratch a geeky itch, trigger developer triggers, generate smiles and “aha” moments. I threw in some references to favourite geeky TV shows too.

Could it generate revenue? Is it too much of a busman’s holiday? Too easy? Too hard? I don’t know. But I’d love to know what you think. If you’re reading this, and it sounds interesting, well… you can just go and start a game. Play on your own if you like. All the games are the same at the moment, although that’s easy for me to work on in future.

A few intrepid players have already escaped. Play for free at https://www.dev-esc.com. Send tweets to @dev_esc. Good luck.

Tags: geeky, code, data

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