@Ivan

• Added a game editor in which players must debug their game and fix issues

• Finished coding the conversation with the artist.
• Added a countdown before the end of the game jam
• Added a Hints and Tips window
• Changed background colour and made many new textures for the game

Teamwork is an essential part of any game jam (except of course if you are working alone like me). I started working on a chat app inside the game and improved window graphics.

“You have 96 hours to make a game that fits the following theme : [Countdown]”. For this year’s GMTK game jam, I decided to make a game which simulates those last 10 stressful minutes right before the end of a Game Jam when you actually need to submit something that works. I want this game to consist of a simple Operating System UI in which the player will have to face various challenges before being able to finally submit the game. I decided to use Unity for this project as it’s the engine I am most comfortable in. Started by making a simple draggable window UI.

I’ve been wanting to learn how to use Blender for quite a while which is why I decided to make an icon for Dots using this software. I found it quite complicated a first but quickly learnt the basics of how it works. Choosing the right shades of red and blue took quite a lot of time.

Worked on the readme file and polished the game for its first ship!

Added a few menus to make launching the game more straightforward. Also included a short guide.

I got inspired by Sebastian Lague’s series on Chess engines so I decided to create my own engine but for Dots. I implemented the Minimax algorithm with Alpha-beta pruning which is often used in Chess bots. It is worth mentioning that despite it’s simple nature, the computational complexity of a dots engine is WAY higher than that of a chess engine: there are about 10^40 possible positions in chess compared to 10^120 in Dots. Furthermore, there is very little documentation on Dots engines, except for one article from 2002. The image attached is a game between a depth 2 and a depth 4 engine.

Implemented the ability to have more than 2 players! This is not part of the classical game rules but I found this variation to be very fun to play. Currently it supports up to 6 players. Implementing this functionality required me to change the way players are handled which made the code clearer.

Fully separated the game logic from the Pygame graphical interface. I am now considering making a web version of the game using Django

Lost against my little sister TWICE

Significantly increased the precision of the dot-capturing algorithm and added a scoreboard.

Implemented the dot-capturing algorithm. A dot is captured when it is completely surrounded by opponents’ dots. This turned out to be much more complicated than expected.

I decided to start off Stardance by coding a pen-and-paper strategy game that I loved playing as a child: Dots (aka Kropki or Tochki). First, I created a grid layout and implemented the ability to place dots.