What is Questionable Battleship?
Questionable, yes. Battleship... technically.
Questionable Battleship was our first pass at something that people other than ourselves might find interesting, though what we ended up with is a far cry from our original vision. I'll spend a paragraph or three on what you would have seen if you had clicked that link, and the rest I'll devote to a rough sketch of what our ambitions are.
Currently, we have a very basic implementation of a single version of battleship. We stick fairly closely to what I think is a fairly classic ruleset[1], though there are some things to watch out for. Two players, the usual ships, single shots in turn, the works. However, since we're indecisive, you may or may not be notified when you sink one of your opponent's ships.
Allow me to clarify: This version does not notify you when you sink an opponent's ship, but this version does.
It'd be great if those were the only differences, but no, that would make it too easy for you to choose which you want to use. In a nutshell, the first version is a fuller experience including sound and some actual graphics, while the latter is a simpler and much more basic experience.
Questionable Battleship in its current form doesn't deliver a satisfying experience to players, nor does it have many features that we at C.A.Pi.T.A.L. would like. Below are some ramblings about a few things that we thought might be nice to have.
Game Modes
There's a variation of Battleship in which players fire off salvos instead of single shots. Then there are further variations on that, changing the number of shots players fire as ships sink. It might also be interesting to see what happens when players' turns advance the game concurrently instead of in alternating order. The upshot is that we'd like to support a somewhat varied set of rules.
Things have the potential to get very strange here very quickly as rules change, but we won't think of everything. So the ultimate goal here is to allow players to mix and match rule tweaks to build somewhat customized game modes on the fly. This is an ambitious endgame goal, for sure, but it's worth working towards.
Spectating
When you play a real board game, you're typically right by your opponent, and other people can just walk over and watch the game unfold. However, when you're playing over the internet, you're usually much farther from your opponent and it's much harder for your friends to pop in and watch the game. A spectator feature helps alleviate this [imaginary] problem, but introduces the risk that someone may spectate their own game in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage.
Chat
Some internet based applications can't be considered complete without some form of chat, but a game like Battleship probably isn't one of them. We don't need too many fancy features like image embedding or a rich text editor, but basic text chat isn't too out of line, nor does it seem too demanding of a task.
Quick Play / Invite Links
Sometimes you just want to play a game of Battleship without worrying about all the other cruft. Even though Questionable Battleship in its current form only asks for a name and a room name, that can still be too much. There should be a way to just drop into a game.
User Accounts
No one asked for them, and no one really needs an account for a website that just plays Battleship. But we might be able to calculate your overall winrate, and maybe even your winrate against your friends too.
That's a rich enough feature list to plan around, and the hope is that it's enough to back up a reasonably polished product that we can release into the wild. It'll keep up busy for a while too though, so keep an eye out for more posts about improving Questionable Battleship!