Tic Tac Toe Fighter isn’t actually the very first game I ever made; that honour goes to an ASCII Fruit Machine by the name of Turbo Moonrat Plus Gold.

Back in 2007 I was a Games Tester for a company that made old fashion mechanical fruit machines, but was interested in programming, so decided to see if I could write a version of what I was testing myself. The company coded it’s games in C, so that’s what I used; and because the machines were mechanical there were no graphical libraries I could use, hence the decision to create it in a windows console using ASCII graphics.

It only took a couple of weeks to create; much quicker than I expected when it replicates all the legalities of a Czech Republic fruit machine at the time. I only really made a few stylistic tweaks to the source code to get it ready for public consumption; a lot of it actually held up pretty well looking at it 4 years later!

Just over a year ago now I moved from being a games tester to becoming a games developer within the company I work for, and this is the game that helped me get there! Using the company’s development libraries, I created Tic Tac Toe Fighter in around a month; a good effort for my first attempt at creating a game from nothing in C++!

For my first game I wanted a simple game with rules that were easy to grasp, so that whilst programming I wouldn’t be struggling with game design decisions. Tic Tac Toe fit the bill perfectly; an easy to understand game but with the scope to create intelligent AI. The Street Fighter II theme was a light bulb moment half way through development, when the core game was already completed. I knew it would just be cool to see the characters in there, to hear the OC Remix music. It gave an otherwise low key game a memorable style to impress as my first project.