Often times, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by a grand idea and To see it as some unreachable pie in the sky. This was my outlook towards a lot of things in life, especially everything creative. This illusion then broke by looking at the process behind a complex idea and realizing that it was achieved by constant iteration (like we’ll see with tic tac toe)
After I wrote my previous blog post (which I highly encourage you to read before moving on) I realized how valuable the process behind a decision is. The thinking behind it. And although that post was to show you how I personally think through a problem, I still think seeing an example and the thought process behind it is how you train your mind to think through problems.
I want to demonstrate this with a simple example that almost everybody is familiar with. I want to show you how a friend and I, sat bored on a flight, and decided to start twisting and iterating on the rules of the simple game of tic tac toe.
THE PROCESS
In order to iterate on something you have to understand what makes it … tic 😉 YUP I just did that. Moving on, I am someone who gets easily overwhelmed when I am presented with infinite possibilities. So I try to break something down into it’s most basic components in order to give me something to focus on.
If you are familiar with game design or any design field, I’m sure you’ve heard people tell you that the ability to break down is key to being a good designer. I got told this a lot in college but always wondered what I was breaking something down to. There’s a million ways to break something abstract down and usually the method and end result are only informed by what you want to achieve from the process. So here’s an attempt to formalize my thought process as I sat on that flight.
My end goal is to still have the game feel like Tic tac toe and have it hold the same role as it does now. I still want it to be a quick game to pick up while making it just complex enough to open up some strategic options in the mid-game. This will hopefully raise the skill ceiling while reducing the number of tie games. A Tic Tac Toe 2.0 if you will.
In order to accomplish this we will need some tools:
TOOLS
Elementary Actions:
Call them what you like but these are the most basic action a player thinks about that represent a task in a game. This could be something like “sprint”, “throw”, “jump” or even “draw”, “erase” and “swipe”.
Restrictions:
Most of the time, game designers will have underlying restrictions to pair with these actions. Some simple examples are “sprint speed”, “throw arc” and “jump height”. These restrictions help the game feel “balanced” and give the designer tools to tune for the intended experience in the future .
Rules:
Lastly, there are the base rules. What would a racing game be :without a finish line? What would chess be without its different pieces? What would soccer be if you could play it with your hands? Not soccer. These base rules usually provide an identity to a game. In our case we need to keep this identity intact but still iterate on the elementary actions or restrictions of tic tac toe.
Compound actions and patterns:
These in my mind are combinations or repetitions of elementary actions that the player starts to think about as a single maneuver .
Let’s be real if you are playing a character you are not thinking “walk, “run”. You are thinking “go here”, move to the tower” etc. These don’t necessarily need to be subconscious but end up being a strategy of elementary actions. A simple jump turns into Alternate jumping between parallel walls, a simple punch becomes a fighting combo. These are all great examples of compound actions.
I’ve tried to keep it kind of general up until now but let’s finally apply the above breakdown to iterate on the tic tac toe. For the sake of this article I’ll discuss one direction I took and a problem that occurred
THE BREAKDOWN
Action:
- Placing an X or O piece
Restrictions:
- The player can only place one piece per turn
- Once a piece is placed, it is permanent
- The player must place a piece within the grid
Rules:
- The game must start with an empty 3×3 grid and 2 players
- Ever player places their pieces on the board taking turns one at a time
- The first player to get 3 of their pieces connecting in a straight line wins
- If none of the players achieve this, the game is a draw.
This breakdown gives us a simple list to start twisting. We can add or remove an action or even lift or change restrictions. What if you could place 2 pieces? What if the board wasn’t 3×3? What if you could erase a piece?
Patterns:
Next, we look at the outcome of doing these simple actions and the overall flow of the game.
Patterns and strategies also help give the player a short term goal that may or may not lead to the end goal. This usually is a great source of satisfaction. Although tic tac toe is a very simple game, if you’ve played enough games you start seeing a pattern emerge. An optimal strategy: the double cross.
The double cross in tic tac toe is an easy strategy that guarantees your win. It is when you place 3 of your pieces in a pattern which creates two or three options to win in your next turn. Of course your opponent can only place one piece which leads you to win.
It’s a really satisfying way to win but is fairly one dimensional if you know the trick is coming. It becomes predictable partly because there are only a few ways to double cross someone. This was definitely something I wanted to grow.
TIC TAC TOE 2.0
To start, most rules remain the same.The first player to get 3 of their pieces connecting in a straight line wins. If none of the players achieve this, the game is a draw.
Changes:
First, we expand the board. The 3×3 board can only have a limited number of outcomes and thereby, strategies. This is the source of the predictability of tic tac toe.
1) The board becomes a 5×5 board.
We played a few rounds on this new board to realize that it took too long to play a round. It also made the game a little too easy since you just have more room to play the same game as before. To fix this:
2) Each player will place two pieces in their turn.
This led to a really fun version of the game and we knew it was the right direction to go. It provided more strategic choice to the player and kept the game to a similar length as the original. A big win was that it allowed for one piece to be used for a forced move (like to block the other player) and the other for an unforced move (for future strategy).
Unfortunately, after a few rounds, there were a few byproducts of this decision that became exploits. It was time to introduce a few restrictions to our newly formed action.
Exploits:
1) The adjacent exploit: when the player places their two pieces in adjacent tiles, they instantly have 2 options on either side to win in their next few turns.
This would lead the second player to use both pieces to block in their turn. This then allows the first player 2 unforced moves that they can use to win the game. (Demonstrated below)
This creates
Restriction: The player is not allowed to place two pieces in adjacent tiles in the same turn.
This encouraged the forced and unforced split mentioned above as well as fixes the exploit.
2) The instant win exploit: The player could quickly win very quickly by placing 2 pieces next to a previous piece.
With this exploit the player can go from a single piece in one turn to 3 pieces in the next to win the game. This for obvious reasons felt very cheap and made the opponent feel helpless. I thought about increasing the win condition to 4 pieces but this would have too many repercussions. I was also afraid this would make the game just feel like a bigger version of the original. So Instead we just started with removing the ability to win by placing 2 pieces.
This creates
Restriction: The Player cannot win by placing 2 of the 3 required winning pieces in the same turn.
These restrictions removed most of the cheesy strategies but gave birth to a slightly more complicated pattern.
3) The Diagonal Exploit
The 5×5 board and the 2 piece per turn rules had created an interesting pattern. The adjacent exploit could still be created if it was accomplished on multiple turns. (Two pieces placed in adjacent tiles but on different turns). The problem was that the diagonals on the board provided abundant opportunity to create this exploit accidentally.
There are 6 diagonals on the board that span across 4 tiles or more. Placing pieces on the intersection points of the diagonals would make it easy to accidentally set yourself up to use the adjacent exploit because of how likely you would have 2 pieces next to each other and the easy connectivity of the tiles to the rest of the board. I liked that the intersection points created desirable tiles on the grid but the diagonals that span across 5 spaces (dotted lines) provided too much opportunity.
This leads to one more change :
Restriction: The center piece of the board is now unavailable.
This reduces the number of diagonals to 4 and also removes the possibility of winning the game in horizontal and vertical lines through the center. This reduced total possibilities and also allowed for more focus on the diagonals for the game. Although the diagonals are still a problem I left them in as the optimal strategy.
STRATEGY
Double Cross 2.0 (triple cross):
At its core, the double cross maneuver in tic tac toe stems from the fact that the player won’t have enough pieces to block all potential win tiles. This strategy still applies on the 5×5 grid. The Diagonal exploit mentioned above has now become a skilled maneuver. If a player can plan ahead and manage to place their pieces in adjacent tiles in multiple turns, it sets them up for a triple cross.
CONCLUSION
At the end of the day, this is a pretty grounded iteration of tic tac toe. Revisiting our goals, it definitely plays more like a tic tac toe 1.5 since it still very much still feels like tic tac toe, The triple cross maneuver increases the skill ceiling of the game and the larger board provides more opportunity for wins.
We could have easily gone with wilder options like allowing players to erase pieces or some side objective where the player can form a shape to create a power up of some kind, but hopefully this grounded example still provided enough insight on how to iterate on an already established idea. It’s important to tackle one problem at a time while still revisiting the bigger picture and of course, your goals.
So I encourage you to play this version and find its many flaws or even make your own! It’s a great exercise and hopefully it changes the way you think through a problem.
(Going to start sharing some favorite videos at the end of the article. Since I mentioned fighting combos here’s one that isn’t a typical combo but still demonstrates compound actions really well: https://youtu.be/klaWV-szmnY )
Comments are closed