Tic-Tac-Toe with a twist.
Change the board size and win condition.
Alter to your liking.
The algorithm is designed to take advantage of certain constraints.
Assumptions/constraints:
- Winning condition only happens after a token is placed down.
- Only horizontal, vertical and diagonals need to be check for winning condition
- Player win condition ignores position of other players.
Variables:
- p: number of players
- w: board width
- h: board height
- n: number of consecutive tokens to win
Algorithm
- Setup boolean playerLocationMatrix of size p * w * h. Initialised to false.
- For each token placed, update playerLocationMatrix and check win condition for that player.
- Collect location data from horizontal, vertical and diagonal ray of size n or under.
- From each ray, count number of consecutive tokens.
- If number of consecutive tokens > n, then the player wins.
By initialising an array, the game cannot adapt to dynamic board size changes.
One possible solution is to use a node with 8 pointers for each direction. This enables direct extraction of the 'star-arranged' of values, for checking the win condition.
Another approach is to use a hash table. The challenge is finding a data structure that works for other algorithms too. For example, you migh want to add attacking abilities.
I had a friend who created a physical card game that incorporated Tic-Tac-Toe rules. Now I've never learnt Unity before, so why not take this opportunity to develop a digital game for him. The algorithm shown here is probably overkill for the game. However, this serves as one of the key components to the game.
Please excuse the not so pleasant UI/UX and simplicity... I'm just learning Unity :)
Ciao. Have fun!