Robs Friday Lesson 26/10/2012

In today's lesson we were given these point to think about:

- What challenges do the players face, what actions do they take to overcome them?

- How do players affect each other?

- Is the game perceived by the players as fair?

- Is the game re playable? If so why?

- What is the games intended audience?

- What is the 'CORE' of the game, second by second, minute by minute, the things you do over and over, that represent the fun part?

We were then asked to pair up and play the most basic versions of the game Battleships. Once we had played through it the once we were then tasked to make some iterations to the basic game to see how it would effect it. You have to only make one change at a time so that you know if that one iteration has made the game any better or worse then change it again. Our first iteration was to add a second shot once you managed to sink one of the ships which you could use straight away or wait to use it later in the game. I found that this worked very well within the game.

Our second iteration was adding more grid space by adding the rows K and 11. We found this not to be very useful and decided to just forget about that. The third iteration which we thought was a bit different but worked surprisingly well was adding different shaped ships to the bored like the triangle shaped ship, three across and one down, and the one box ship. We found that this made the game more interesting and worked very well with our first iteration.

Thinking about the points we looked at first i would say that players affect each other by taking shots at each other; but as you don't know where there ships are placed which brings the strategy mechanic to the game. I would say that the game is very fair as you both have the exact same amount of chance to hit each others ships and the rules work very well to make it fair. The game is highly re-playable as games can be quite quick and once you have played the game you want to play again to try and beat your opponent; especially once you had added the iterations to the game.

The game audience would be anyone that likes to play games, but would probably be played by mostly children and family's. The core parts of Battleships is placing your ships within the grid and then trying to shoot the opposing ships, trying to to use a strategy so that you do not miss the ships and get them to miss shooting your ships.