Battleship Iterations

Week 1

Reading:

For this weeks lecture we were meant to read around a particular statement from Costikyan as follows:

"A game is an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle towards goals" (2004:24).

Unfortunately I was on holiday from Thursday 18th October until Wednesday 24th October, so I did not read the material required, however I was not alone. Due to this, we exchanged notes with the people who had read and commented on the above statement.

From what I understand, Costikyan had discussed the differences between games and what makes a game, a game. He believed that games and puzzles are completely separate for the following reasons (based on the notes and information taken from Elliot and the discussion with the rest of the class):

• Games are to be 'interactive' thus keeping a player involved and active. 
• An interactive game is a game that changes after players choices or moves. 
• Interactive games must have a purpose or a goal. 
• If a game has no goal or purpose then it becomes a toy. 
• An example of a non-interactive game would be a crossword. 
• Games also require struggle to give a player satisfaction. 
• There needs to be a balance of struggle in a game so that it is not impossible or frustrating. 
• Without struggle a game is dead. 
• The meaning of 'Endogenous' is a meaning within a game that adds value to the game (not necessarily real life value), such as games like Monopoly, or more recently, Facebook games.

From the above information I agree with all items except from point four - 'If a game has no goal or purpose then it becomes a toy', I personally do not agree with this statement due to some games such as SimCity, there are no goals initially and the player creates his own goals and achievements as the game progresses.



Battleship:

For the second part of the lecture, we played a round of traditional Battleships, which I lost. From this we then had to come up with Iterations for this game (one at a time per play through), while maintaining the fun factor and hopefully making players want to re-play again and again.

Our first Iteration was to add in different ammo types, each of which were limited per game. The two ammo types we had were:

1. One-Shot - 2 of this ammo per game, fired like a normal shot but if it hits an opponents vessel then that vessel is destroyed in one with the opponent stating that the vessel was destroyed. However you are still uncertain which spaces the vessel occupied. 
2. Cluster Shot - 2 of this ammo per game, fired like a normal shot aiming for a particular spot, but the shot also pans out forming into a '+' shape with the space aimed at being the centre spot.

Our second play through of the game including the above Iteration, we felt as though it was more fun however we needed a further change.

The second Iteration was to make the game board larger. For our practice round (third play through) we increased the size by an extra 3 columns both across and down due to the limitation of the size of the practice board, however we would look to increase it further if necessary. We also added in extra vessels to this Iteration to counter the size increase of the board so that we ended up with 2 of each vessel.

From our third play through including the second Iteration, we decided that having more vessels made the size increase of the board pointless as you still had the same odds of hitting a vessel. We concluded that we would increase the board size but not add in extra vessels at this stage so this would make the game more challenging as this increases your chances of missing.

From other groups Iterations, there were two ideas that were used which I liked that could possibly be modified and incorporated into our game, they were:

1. 3D board - This idea is quite interesting, I thought about having the board as it currently is but also making it several spaces deep which could represent underwater, water level, and the sky. Next week, if we continue with this, then I may look to implement this idea into our game. 
2. Shaped Vessels - Again, this idea took my interest as it adds a challenge to the game as your opponent would not know the shapes of your vessels.