tic tac toe eng.1: the idea for making the game more complex

 

work in progress, but already testing colors, sprites and composition

 

while reading about another game I had this idea to make tic tac toe more viable and strategic. the goal is still to make a line of three pieces, but each piece now has a number of constitution points. everytime a player lays down a piece, every piece on the board loses one constitution point. when a piece loses all points it is removed from the board. every piece has a different number of points and a special power that activates as soon as you lay it down and it usually involves giving points to your pieces, removing points from the enemy or adding points to the piece itself.

each player begins the game with a random "hand" of pieces and everytime they lay one down, a new one is drawn from a "deck" to replace it. each player has the same pieces in their deck. the goal here is to solve the question of tic tac toe being a solved game by adding the randomness of not knowing what piece you're gonna have and having to improvise.

the inevitable demise of every piece means you have to consider not just the two dimensions of the board, but also the dimension of time, considering if your piece will still be there when you try to form the line and that an enemy piece might get removed, freeing up that space. laying down a piece requires considering what its constitution is and how much it's gonna last, what its power is and where is best to put it as well as the lines being formed by both players.

hopefully it's more engaging than tic tac toe. my impression so far is that it sort of is???? it's pretty short and not super complex, but I think is engaging enough as a very short little game, certainly more engaging than tic tac toe. I find it interesting that sometimes you play a few turns and accomplish nothing actually and also that you truly have to account for time and every piece's inevitable degradation.

fundamentally this is a little experiment and I'm not aiming for anything specific or too successful. I just want to see how this plays.

all of the demos I made so far are exclusively in portuguese, but the next one will have an english option!