After much consideration I decided to jump off of the raw DirectX and C# band wagon and give XNA a try as I have heard nothing but raving reviews about it.

      I spent a week porting and rewriting the GWNorthEngine that I had built from the ground up to XNA and with a much cleaner code base. Afterwards I needed to write a simple game that touched on most (if not all) of the ported code to ensure it was all working properly on top of the XNA framework.

      Since I love Tic Tac Toe I decided I will rewrite it again since the last one was years ago and the code was really butchered. I also didn't wnat to just write a clone of my older graphical game, I wanted to make a polished version of it to the best of my abilities given my (extremely) limitted artistic ability. Furthermore, from a code perspective I not only wanted to write it cleaner using the now ported XNA GWNorthEngine, I wanted to learn something new.

      This brings us to the impossible difficulty. This difficulty setting will never play a less than perfect game, it will never play less than a tie. The way this works is via the MiniMax algorithm which essentially plays out every move on the board before making its actual move.

Flowers Installer.zip
Flowers Source.zip

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      Objectives
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Objectives of this demo is to write a simple 2d game with the ported engine code for XNA to identify remaining bugs and to finally write something in XNA. I am expecting this demo to be my highest poilished demo thus far. I am hoping to get the whole game functional within 10 hours and polish there after.


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      Core(Phase 1)
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Raw version of the game functional with programmer art
[*]Planning
[*]Placeholder art
[*]Model objects
[*]Make each model script accessible
[*]Render basic background with programmer art
[*]Render the board
[*]Render pieces on click
[*]Render basic HUD
[*]Implement easy
[*]Implement board state mechanics (Cats game/Win/etc)
[*]Implement moderate difficulty
[*]Render main menu screen
[*]Render in game menu screen
[*]Implement flow mechanism
[*]Implement Min Max algorithm (Impossible AI)
[*]Implement simple pruning
[*]Implement Alpha/Beta pruning on the algorithm to make it faster...although in TicTacToe you will never see this performance increase...this is more of a best practises step
      -This can also give you the wrong move without this....wrong in the sense that you
      will still win but in more moves opposed to picking the first option to win

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      Polish(Phase 2)
============================
Replace the programmer art with "real"(best I can do as a non-artist) art and make the game not only maintain its functionality but also add a nice playable environment
[*]Background
[*]Screen fades in and out
[*]All sprites not part of the winning line do their dying animation
[*]Sun sprite
[*]Clouds
[*]House
[*]Fence
[*]Garden
[*]Bush around the gardens edge
[*]Smoke particles from the house's chimney
[*]Delay computers move by a CONSTANT so it doesn't move right away
[*]Sfx
[*]Score is on a rock or engraved
[*]Visual indication of who's turn it is
[*]Add in a real moderate difficulty that does the same as the current moderate except it doesn't try to block. Change current Moderate difficulties label to "Hard"
[*]Take another pass at the clouds...redo art again and use multiple textures instead of just 1

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      Persistent bugs
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[*]In DEBUG mode the XNA audio engine throws an exception if you exit as a sound effect is playing
      -Problem with the XNA framework when you manually(correctly) dispose of sound
      effects on closing. The solution is to let the ContentManager handle the
      disposale of SFX's
[*]When the game is a cats game, without hitting replay you hit escape and exit to the main menu and enter a difficulty and when the game goes to game over again, one of the pieces on the board will blank out instead of dying like everything else. Might have something to do with the computer going first in the new game. The square that blanks out appears to be the first move
      -Resolution: Very difficult to track down but the problem was that in the reset
      method of the game, the computers move delay was > the wait delay time and for
      some reason this was causing the flicker that was noticable as soon as the
      computer moved and the subsequent failure of that place displaying upon cats game

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ALPHA/BETA METRICS
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Format is (board_index: number_of_branches_searched)

Pre alpha beta when I moved to position 0 on the board;
1: 8232
2: 7584
3: 8232
4: 7332
5: 6380
6: 7584
7: 6380
8: 7980

Post alpha beta when I moved to position 0 on the board;
1: 749
2: 641
3: 336
4: 844
5: 365
6: 335
7: 381
8: 438

That proves the importance of alpha/beta pruning, cut the searches exponentially, if this were a bigger game like chess this performance upgrade would be critical

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      Time
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Planning:
Game mechanics:      3hours
MinMax algorithm:      2hours
Total: 5hours

Programming:            
core:                  9.5hours
MinMaxAlgorithm:       5.25hours
Simple pruning:            .25hours
Alpha/Beta pruning:            1hours
polish:                  11.75hours
Specific bugs:            1.5hours
Post development cleanup:      .5hours
Total time:      29.75hours

Art:       15.25hours      
Sound:
      .75 hours
      
Total Time:      50.75 hours
Total lines:      1944