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A new rendition of a classic game. Strategy rules on the open seas as your boats fight it out with your opponent. Place your boats on the grid, then take turns aiming your cannons. If you get a hit, you just might sink your opponent’s battleships!
BattleBoats is a two-player game, and an homage to the classic paper-and-pencil version which dates back to sometime before the First World War. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_game for more information on the background of this game.
With DartBattleBoatsThis game comes to life on your PC or on your mobile device. But the cool thing is that the Dart version of the game lets you enjoy multiplayer games across different devices - even if those devices are totally different types of hardware. Will your PC Battleship take on her Motorola-made Destroyer?
Click here to join the Alpha Users Program and start using this Dart.
Click here to see the Software Version Release Notes for this Dart.
Upon initially running Battleboats, a Splash screen is displayed, and short clip from the Naval Hymn “Anchors Aweigh” is played. The player that originally ran the game is called the First Player.
The user is then presented with a connection form, used to select an opponent. As this is a two player game, the form is presented with the choices as buttons, since only one opponent can be selected. Clicking on any choice will begin sending the game (or will run from a cached copy if the Dart was previously sent to the target device.) to the Second Player.
Once running on both devices, the game will again display the Splash Screen and play the opening theme. Then the game will enter the Setup Stage.
The board layout consists of two grids on each device; each grid consisting of 10x10 or 100 squares. Each player has a Home grid and a Target grid. The Home grid is normally displayed at the bottom of the window, with the Target grid at the top; when the screen is wider than it is tall, the Home grid will be to the left side and the Target on the right. On devices with especially small screens, only one grid is displayed, with the View button used to switch between grids; on such devices the display will automatically switch to the Home grid on the opponent's turn, and back to the Target grid on your turn.
Each Player's Target grid represents their view of the other player's Home grid. The players position their own ships on their Home grid, and fire at their opponent's ships on the Target grid. A player will only see the ship images on their own Home grid. Finding the positions of the opponent's ships will be the key to victory. There is also a blinking cursor used to position ships and to fire at the opponent. This can be moved with a mouse (if available), with the cursor keys or D-pad.
Each player has four ships: an aircraft carrier (five squares long), a battleship (four squares), a cruiser (three squares), and a destroyer (two squares). They are shown on the Home grid.
Gameplay consists of two Stages: the Setup Stage, and the Shooting Stage.
When entering the Setup Stage, each player's ships will be randomly positioned on their Home grid. The players are then given the option of re-positioning the ships. If the player accepts the random position they are shown the “Wait dialog” (see below).
If a player chooses to re-position the ships, the blinking square cursor will be placed on the Home grid. The ships can be grabbed, dragged, and dropped with a mouse (if available) by pressing and holding the (left) mouse button and releasing the button to drop the ship; or a ship can be grabbed with a single click, moved, and released with another click. Alternatively, pressing the Confirm key (Enter on a PC, or the Confirm or OK button on a phone or PDA) will grab a ship under the cursor position, and the arrow keys used to move the ship; pressing Confirm again will release the ship. While “grabbed” the ship image itself will blink; if the ship's position overlaps another ship, the blink will alternate with a Red rectangle to show that the ship cannot be positioned and must be moved before being released.
While a ship is “grabbed” it can be rotated between horizontal and vertical by pressing the '0' key (the status line at the bottom shows a prompt for this). In addition, whenever the ship is grabbed at the top or leftmost square, it will rotate to vertical when the ship is moved up, and will rotate to horizontal when the ship is moved to the left. Note that while moving a ship, the section of the ship that was initially “grabbed” is highlighted with a square; this square may move if the ship bumps up against the edge of the board.
Once the Player is satisfied with the placement of the ships, pressing the Play button will signal that they are ready to start shooting (if a ship is currently “grabbed” it will be dropped; if in an invalid position, an error is reported and the Play action is cancelled.) If the other player is still placing ships, then a Waiting dialog is shown. If the player tires of waiting, there is a Quit button available to exit the game.
When both players are ready to play, the game advances to the Shooting Stage.
During the shooting stage, the players alternate turns firing a single shot at their opponent's ships on the target board. The message text at the bottom of the screen will end in “your turn” on current Player's device; in addition, the blinking cursor will change to a red targeting cross. The Player that originally ran the game will always shoot first.
When shooting begins, the blinking cursor will move to the target board. To fire, either move the cursor with the arrow keys and hit the confirm key; or click with the mouse pointer (if available) on the target square. The targeted square will display a short animation and a sound will play - explosion for a hit, splash for a miss - denoting the result of the shot. The result will also be noted in the message text at the bottom of the screen.
Note that the targeted square will also animate on the target Player's Home grid, so each player can see where their opponent is shooting. The sounds will also play on the target device. After the animation, a hit or miss image is left over the targeted square so the players can track the progress of the game.
When a player hits the last square on one of the opponent's ships, the message text will also announce which of the opponent's ships was sunk, and an additional klaxon sound will be played
When a player sinks the opponent's last ship, the game is over and a gong sound will play; the message line will show the winner's name. The First Player can then begin a new game (choose New Game from the menu).
The First Player can abandon the current game and start a new one at any time by selected “New Game” from the menu.
Game sounds may be muted by selecting “Sounds” from the menu. Selecting “Sounds” again will restore playing the sounds. This is controlled independently on each device; although the First player can mute the sounds before sending (click Cancel on the initial connection form, then choose “Sounds” from the Menu, then choose “Add Commander” from the menu.) In this case the game will start muted on both devices.
Either player may quit at any time; when one player quits the other player will see an alert dialog informing them that the game is over; after a short delay the game will also exit on that device.
Each player can choose a player name or “handle”: select “Change my name” from the Menu. This name will be shown in the upper right corner of that player's screen, and will be used in the message text to record the results of shots. The player name is stored in the Dart registry and thus will persist between sessions. This name is also shared with other Dart games (such as SudokuMobileXtreme); all games will see the same player name, and a change to the player name in one game will affect the player's name in other games.
The player name initially defaults to the device name; in addition, the games will show the player name in their connection forms instead of the device name if a “handle” has been specified.
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