Super Tic-Tac-Toe

So, I did not foresee that after my daughter's first week of school, we'd enter a Spring Break that never ended... pandemic lockdown. And after years of stress, my body has had some breakdowns - I had what seemed to be a heart attack a couple of weeks ago and took an ambulance ride to hospital in the middle of the night. It was one of the most physically painful and terrifying experiences of my life. Despite that the ECG found no evidence of myocardial infarction, I have no better description for what happened than "heart attack". It stopped beating for wayyy too long and I blacked out. I won't go into all the details; I'm glad I'm still here. My greatest fear was leaving my daughter without her father.

My plan on moving to Ontario had included very definite and important goals to immediately start a new life and healthy routine: gym, yoga, martial arts; tech and career meetups, and a social life and hopefully dating again. I was also excited for my daughter to make new friends and have an expanded social life. The political pandemic response has torpedoed all of that, and dramatically increased my stress.

While I'd initially thought that lockdown would provide an ideal opportunity to double down on my software development work, the stress and pressure of parenting and home schooling and my existing health challenges has proved too much. I'm going to surrender my software development goals for now and see how it goes in the coming months.

So, I've tried to implement remote multiplayer - I built it with local multiplayer from the start, where players share the same device. But websockets or any kind of realtime app was new ground for me, and after many failed attempts to get it working in the game, I've created a side project chat app as a better venue for learning this communications technology (using socket.io library).

I don't know how work will go in the near term; I'm making a big move in five days, from Burnaby BC Canada, to Kitchener Ontario Canada (several thousand kilometers). We'll be moving in with my Dad for awhile; my mother died of cancer last year, and I'm a single Dad, so it will be good for all of us to have each other.

I've added several features and UI elements, worked (hard) on responsive design (though, it's still half-broken - it's a difficult UI to make adapt). I've added a splash screen with the option to go directly to the game, or to "learn more" where instructions are given. It took a lot of work to make the smooth-scroll menu work correctly, but it does. There are many, many small features and tweaks that took a lot of work to figure out - it's been a great learning project.

So, after three weeks of fulltime+ work on this, the game is playable and fun, and looks decent too! Much work remains to be done, but it is a real joy and milestone in my life to have created a game that we can gather around and actually have fun playing.