Dot Game Center (DGC)

What it Is

Some games benefit from being able to ffeel the tactile or braille board while playing. While these games are perfectly playable with speech, having a dedicated graphical view of the board makes them easier to understand and provides multimodal output. These games are designed to work with the Dot Pad X multiline braille display and graphics tablet, though are playable with speech alone if desired.

Getting Started

• Download the latest release
• Unzip to a folder on your hard drive
• If using a Dot Pad, connect via USB
• Run dgc.exe.

Games - All against the computer unless otherwise noted

Tic Tac Toe

Play the classic game of Ex's and O's

Connect 4

Place 4 of yor tiles in a row to win.

Battleship

First, place your 5 ships, then try to destroy your opponent's ships before they destroy yours.

15 Puzzle

The traditional sliding tile puzzle. Put the numbers in order from 1 to 15. If you get stuck, press F3 to have the computer autosolve.

Controls

Games can be controled both through the Dot Pad as well as the computer.

Main Menu

• F1/F4 move to previous or next menu item
• F2 select menu item

In-Game Controls

• DotPad: panLeft/panRight move to previous or next column, F1/F4 move to previous or next row, F2 perform action
• Keyboard: arrow keys move, Enter/Space action, Escape back to menu
• On game over: F3 or Escape returns to menu

Technical Explanation

Dot Game Center is a Windows-first game app built with wxPython and DotPad. It uses a DotPad Python wheel and its DotPad class as the hardware layer. That class handles both output areas on the device:

• the 20-cell text line for short prompts/status
• the 300-cell graphics grid for game boards and markers

DGC sits above that wrapper and focuses on gameplay, navigation, and accessibility.

Setup from Source

From dgc/:

.\setup.ps1

• setup.ps1 runs uv sync and installs the newest dotpad-*.whl from vendor/dotpad/.
• uv is required.

uv run dgc

or from Command Prompt:

dgc.bat

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please create an issue with bugs/feature ideas or submit a PR for consideration.

Building & Releasing

Local build (produces dist/dgc/):

.\install.ps1

Cut a release (bumps version, tags, pushes — GitHub Actions builds and publishes automatically):

.\release.ps1 0.3

The workflow builds on windows-latest, zips dist/dgc/, and attaches it to a GitHub Release. First-time CI setup: run uv run python _setup_ci.py once to create .github/workflows/release.yml, then commit it.

License

• MIT This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

Note

These games are not created by Dot Inc. No warranty is implied.