Dots

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.