Tic Tac Challenge
About
Tic Tac Challenge
Tic Tac Challenge is a large puzzle game revolving around "what if we combined tic tac toe with temperature mechanics?" It's my largest and most ambitious project by a long shot. If you do manage to complete all 81 levels, hat's off to you. Each level is designed to be a unique puzzle - there are several points you will need to learn how to use the mechanics in a way you haven't before to be able to solve the levels.
Development
The idea
This game had a few different inspirations, the biggest being Maxwell's Demon - a thought experiment about a demon that can sort particles by temperature. I also was inspired by puzzle games like Understand, 5&N-step steve, and more. I had also been playing quite a bit of Minesweeper, and enjoyed the general logic it used. And how to mix those in a good way, well tic tac toe seemed like a good base to start with.
The start
Origianlly, it wasn't even a puzzle game - rather it was an arcade game with an expanding board that used the temperture concept. It was coded in python, and was pretty fun.
Itteration
But I wanted to continue, I honestly loved the idea. So over the next 6 months, I was prototyping mechanics and iterating on the design. I also started learning Godot for this project, which was a fun experience. I also started posting some youtube shorts to see if the game could get a bit of traction and some more ideas to enter.
The mechanics
Tic tac toe is an easy game to program. This.. this was hard lol. I had to do some research on projects like Conways game of life to figure out how to code these with a reasonable amount of performance. Just to give some example: 3+ row detection in a 9x9 board, having each cell give it's 8 neighbors a temperture level, synergy for 2 in a rows, and chaining for things like conveyors and wires. A solid month was spent just on performance optimizations, just in thought experiments I had to solve.
Level count
As I have said, this is my most ambitious project. Paint factory has 30 levels in total, and took a month. This has 81 main levels. Each one being far more complex in design than any in paint factory. Over half of those took over an hour to design, and another hour to test. This is a harder game - you have to know the target mechanic in and out to be able to solve the levels. But at the same time, the levels are seemingly very simple in actions, similar to something like minesweeper or understand. So a lot of the work was spacing out the mechanics in a way that you can put together the solution without needing to randomly guess. Not only that, I tried to also avoid duplicate style levels - just about every level has a unique mechanic or concept to it. Just level design alone took over 200 hours of work.
Q/A
How long did it take to make?
9 months. 6 for planning, 3 for development.
Hardest level
In understanding, I would say level 10 is the biggest jump (shift from 3-in-a-row to heat spread logic), but level 5 gets more people stuck. World 7 though has the hardest in raw complexity.
Worst part of the process
I started to burn out really bad going into world 7, and making that world just was a struggle. With a game like this you can't just sit down and make a few levels, as each one takes hours. It would litterally be I go on my computer, sit there for a few hours, take a break, and repeat. I had to take a week and a half long break after world 7 before working on world 8 to recover mentally. It's the main reason why in world 8 I created the Funny box - it changes things up and lowers the difficulty & time needed to make each level, which made them the funnest in the game to make.