Battleships Iteration

Okay, I know it's been a while since I've done a blog post but I can assure you that I'm on form and not missing any - I am keeping on top of it, was just having a break while I could in my reading week. Anyway, on with this blog post on Battleships.

As a part of my lecture last Tuesday we all were told that we would be iterating the classic game of battleships, a game of strategy or luck is debatable (I'm more inclined to say luck which is why I personally don't like the game that much), where the objective is to sink all of your opponents ships on a 10x10 grid - one ship of 5 in length, one of 4, two of 3 and one of 2.

Anyway, to start with we were told simply to play the game just to familiarise ourselves with it in case we'd forgotten and just to see if we could think of anything that did or didn't work very well about it - this was the real point of the exercise; to see if we could iterate an already existing and established game and also to see, as a class, how different our ideas of iteration were.

Matthew Jarvis and I were a pair that did iterations and our iterations were quite basic as we didn't want to overcomplicate the game - I personally wanted to try and do iterations that would remove the random luck elements of the game as I feel that a game that relies on luck to be fun, while it can be enjoyable and tense, has no learning curve or skill which is what I prefer - I like to call myself a master of a game. The first iteration we came up with was being granted another move if your found get a hit on a ship (only for the first hit, not every hit otherwise you could completely destroy a ship in one go) - this worked well as it gave a person a chance to recover if they were heavily behind, it sped up the game as well while retaining all the tension that already existed.

Our second iteration was essentially an undo button - if you got hit you had 3 'repairs' that you could use to remove the damage to the ship; this was basically the opposite to our previous iteration and allowed the player to lengthen the game and give them a chance to find more of the opponents ships before they lost the game.

Other iterations that people came up with were missile attacks that hit everything along a row, radars for finding ships, power-ups that strengthened your ship or weakened enemies and the ultimate square of death which would cause you to lose if you hit it. As you can see there was plenty of diversity with the iterations which proved that two people, even on the same course and similar wavelengths can have their own unique ideas.

This exercise was good fun to do and proved to be very useful for us - it showed me that any game can be iterated, even if it works perfectly fine and you think its a good game, if you want to you can put your own spin on it and make it your own. It also showed me that iterating is a very personal process as demonstrated by the assortment of ideas generated over a simple game like Battleships.

Anyway, that's it for this blog post. 'Til next time - that's all folks!