Tic Tac Toe Game

This project will be an ongoing project. You will work on it over the next few weeks at the same time you are working on weekly lab assignments.

You will create your own interface. The following is an image of the interface I created

Requirements:

Provide a mechanism for two players to take turns claiming squares

Once claimed the square may not be claimed by the other player

When a player has claimed three squares in a row (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) display a message stating who won the game.

When all squares have been claimed and nobody has won display a message reporting a tie.

Keep track of and report the total number of games won by each player, and the number of ties

 Provide the ability to start a new game

What I did:

I have created two versions of this program. They are located in the Sample Executables folder in Angel

Version 1

In one of my versions I used labels and changed the BackColor of the labels when they were clicked. To prevent another player from claiming the square I disabled the label. When a control is disabled (enabled property = False) the control will not respond to a click event. After each box was selected the program inspected all the boxes (using compound If and ElseIF statements)

If lblBox1.BackColor = lblBox2.BackColor And _
    lblBox1.BackColor = lblBox3.BackColor And _
      .....................................................................  Then
      ............
ElseIf    ......

to determine if the game had been won or was a tie.    Please be advised that there is a little more to this since if nobody has claimed any boxes in a row they will all also have the same color. Something to think about........

If the game was over (tie or otherwise) I disabled all of the boxes.

lblBox1.Enabled = False

and displayed appropriate messages.

When a new game was started I enabled all the boxes and set their ForeColor to the beginning color.

lblBox1.BackColor = Color.White

To ensure that all unclaimed boxes were the same color throughout the program execution I set the BackColor of all the labels to the same color in the Form_Load event. The Form_Load event is an event that always executes when the Form is first loaded into memory.

Note: If you need to compare a Color to a "variable" Color (different colors using the same statement) you will need to create a Color reference variable of type Color and store the color you need to use in it.

Dim ColorTesting As New Color    'The keyword New is important

If ........ Then
      ColorTesting = Color.Red
Else
       ColorTesting = Color.Blue
End If

Version 2

In the other version instead of changing the BackColor of the Label I assigned an image to the Image property (I used .ico files that had been imported into the applications resources. You did this with images at the beginning of the semester).

lblBox1.Image = My.Resources.Smile

This version presented more challenges to my first version because I could not simply compare the Image properties of the Labels to see if three in a row had been selected.   (I tried but it did not work.) Instead I used the Tag property of the labels to flag the label as belonging to a particular player . At the same time I assigned the image to the label I stored a string identifying the player who had claimed the box

lblBox1.Tag = "red"

 and then compared the strings stored in the Tag properties to see if the same player had claimed 3 boxes in a row.

If lblBox1.Tag.ToString = strWhosTurn   And _
    lblBox1.Tag.ToString = lblBox2.Tag.ToString   And _
    lblBox1.Tag.ToString = lblBox3.Tag.ToString   Then  ......

We will be covering tools that will be necessary / useful to complete this project in the coming weeks. I will provide more suggestions as we progress.

Remember to:

your name
a brief description of what the program does
A record of how much time you spent on the lab

When you are confident the program works

Submit a zipped folder(s) containing the entire project(s) as an attachment in the appropriate drop box.