Senior Project - TRIUMPH

DreamQuest Software has developed two very popular card games, Championship Hearts and Championship Spades, for the PC market. Championship Spades was developed primarily in Visual Basic with extensive use of direct Win32 API (C++) calls and has been very maintainable and stable. This base was later used to develop Championship Hearts, using Visual Basic to maximize reusability, speed development time, and continue the maintenance benefits. Championship Hearts took full advantage of object-oriented concepts in Visual Basic. A significant portion of the existing Championship Spades objects were reused for the general design, GUI screens, options, artwork, sounds, and such of Championship Hearts, leaving the development to focus primarily on game play algorithms, game variations, usability improvements, better network support, an interactive tutorial, and the AI, DreamQuest's primary competitive edge.

The goal of this project was to extend this development to provide Championship Euchre, a multi-player Internet and standalone version of the classic card game Euchre. Championship Euchre is based on the same successful model as Championship Spades and Championship Hearts, requiring skills in artificial intelligence, network messaging, user interface design, game algorithms, as well as classic process, design, algorithms, data structures, and problem solving.

Since games must be "fun", extra care was taken to play-test the game at several phases during an iterative development cycle to guarantee user acceptance of the final product. The final product runs on Windows 95, 98, NT, and 2000 and allows gamers to play over the Internet or a LAN. It is currently marketed as shareware (with a possible ad-supported freeware version) and is distributed worldwide via the Web and CD-ROMs at www.dqsoft.com.