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Fixed a single, significant, bug. Custom games of Drop Four allowed the user to play pieces anywhere.
0.13 will bring the first iteration of one of the biggest features I’ve wanted to add since I started work on Tic-tac-toe Collection - multi-device multiplayer.
This first version brings multiplayer to devices on the same local area network - generally devices connected to the same WiFi.
All the options currently available to single-device play are available to multiple-device play. You can join with any number of players from each device and games can be saved and then resumed later. For the first version, they have to be resumed with the same devices (although not necessarily the same host), but I plan to lift that restriction in the future (it requires more complicated UI flow).
I hope to have a version in the beta channel shortly. I am still working to make the process more resilient to various problems that are common in multiplayer games.
As I said, this is just the first iteration of multiplayer. The next step is likely to be private games over the internet, followed by match-made games over the internet. How soon that will be, I do not know. I have other features I want to add in the meantime. So, watch this space…
This app is available for iOS and Android. This is a review of the Android version.
Reasonable permission requests:
- Photos/Media/Files.
- Wi-Fi connection information.
Unreasonable permission requests:
- Device ID & call information.
Refusing to install an app because of unnecessary permissions may seem harsh, but is something I think more people should do.
Sadly however, in this case the app is probably not doing anything wrong, but is merely old. It supports Android all the way down to 1.5. In Android 1.5 all apps automatically had access to device ID and call information, therefore all such apps have to require that permission when installed on newer versions of Android, even if they don’t access any of it.
The solution is to release a new version of the app targeting 1.6 and above, which would not need those permissions (the 1.5 version could be left as is and would still be available). But… the app was last updated in June 2013 so that seems unlikely.
- Changed the layout of the “news” on the home page.
- Made the new mode quickplay option (currently Chain) dismissable.
One problem with developing a game based Tic-tac-toe is there are already a lot of versions available. I’m confident I can make one better than most of them, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something I can learn from the others.
So, I’ve decided to start reviewing other tic-tac-toe games. I’m going to start with free games on Android and see how it goes. The first review is already available for Tic Tac Toe by Wintrino.
A very simple version of Tic-tac-toe by Wintrino. You can play two player against another human, or against the AI with one of four difficulty levels. There are no gameplay options available, but there are a few settings to make the game a little nicer to play (turn off welcome screen and turn off “quit game” warnings).
There is a single persistent banner ad, and an interstitial video ad every few games.
Good things
- Quick to load.
- Quick AI.
- Pretty detailed statistics (albeit with typo - “Tota” instead of “Total”).
- Real privacy policy.
Bad things
- No animation.
- No game options.
Game features missing from Tic-tac-toe Collection
- Sounds effects.
- Clear stats.
App features missing from Tic-tac-toe Collection
- Share app with friends.
- Rate on Google Play.
0.12.4 includes a significant rewrite of large parts of the core game engine. Bits that I didn’t like had started to build up, and some plans I have for new game modes looked to be quite difficult to implement because of decisions I made earlier that seemed like a good idea at the time.
The current state of the engine is now much better, however the process does make me nervous. The changes affect not just how the engine plays the game, but also how data is saved and loaded. And people generally don’t like their save games being corrupted.
So as part of the work for this version I also wrote a tool (that I have been intending to write for a while) that checks for save game compatibility. The idea is the tool creates games with various combinations of settings, plays them through (with the easy AI) and saves the result. As part of the normal automated tests I run with each version, these save games are then loaded, the moves replayed, and the result compared with the previous result. Any discrepancies are failures that I can investigate.
Importantly, the initial set of games is based on running the tool before the big engine changes. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) it discovered a bug straight away. Loading a game with “free turn” set to true (i.e. any of the Chain game modes) would not always pick up the “free turn” setting (this was fixed in 0.12.3).
So the plan is every time I add a new game mode (or change the engine significantly), I generate a new set of save files, and during every release the current set of save files is checked for compatibility. Hopefully this should keep everyone happily saving and loading.
The game engine has been extensively cleaned up to make future work simpler, leading to a small performance improvement.
Chain game modes could “forget” they were chain when reloaded. This has now been fixed.