Maybe there were a swarm of applicants. You were obviously qualified but they just went with someone else for no reason that reflects on you.
And I have a feeling that I'm gambling - in terms of allocating time vs what I'll get. That's why paid projects make more sense - with defined goals.
In the OP's case - tic tac toe game is completed? playable? that's it - he gets paid, no matter if they don't hire him for some other reasons.
Not so sure about that. I looked at parent's code submission. In particular, his game logic looks like this - https://github.com/jyothepro/tictactoe/blob/master/TicTacToe...
This is unduly verbose & has newbie programmer written all over it.
Here, I just wrote up the same tictactoe over lunch in the repl - https://gist.github.com/krishnanraman/7591435
Without much thought into optimiziation, refactoring etc., its about 20 lines of actual code. Random TicTacToe is a very simple game. Even if you take that Scala & translate line by line into Objective-C, you shouldn't see an exponential explosion from 20 lines to 400+ lines for game logic alone.
Even I dint spend any time in refactoring or optimization as this is just a hack to get past a job interview.
When an interviewer gives you tasks like this do they expect optimized and refactored code?