Now we've looked at the concept art that was used to begin developing Dr. Dobb's Challenge, it's time to look at the game itself.

We're going to look at the Windows game and the Windows Mobile game individually, as each has been uniquely designed to make the most of its platform.

The Windows version of Dr. Dobb's Challenge has been developed by Grubby Games to offer a strong, clean code base for developers to work with, with easy to understand code and clear commenting.

The game itself features Dr. Dobbs, alongside the characters from Microsoft's famous 'Defy All Challenges' machinima videos, in a single-screen platform title where they must avoid bugs and collect Visual Studio icons across multiple levels of increasing difficulty. Character selection, level selection and gameplay instructions are all on the title screen with the best times for each level recorded.

Dr. Dobb's controls are rather simple, simply using the mouse and keyboard, and each of the characters have slightly different speeds and jump heights -- all of which is completely modifiable within the source code.

When the player selects the first level (with, say, Dr Dobbs as their chosen character) they'll see this:

The yellow platforms are "sticky" and cause Dr. Dobbs to slow down when he runs across them. Once the player has collected all of the Visual Studio icons they return to the title screen, where they can choose to play the level again (to beat their best time) or to play another one. Other levels include such fiendish challenges as:

and:

But the beauty of Dr. Dobb's Challenge is it's entirely up to you how you want the levels to look -- or even how the game plays!

If you'd like to play the Dr. Dobb's Challenge then you can download it here, which also includes the full source code (should you want to mod it.)

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