BattleQuips is a Python terminal game, which runs in the Code Institute mock terminal on Heroku.

Users will try to beat the computer by sinking all 5 ships, with each hit revealing a quote from a historical figure.

Live project available here

BattleQuips is based on the classic pen-and-paper game. You can read about it here on Wikipedia.

In this version, the player will be asked if they want to play a game. The board will then be generated with random ship placements from a Google Sheets spreadsheet. They will then choose co-ordinates to attack, e.g. A2, B5 etc.

If their attack is succesful, the terminal will register a Hit!, and a war-related quote will be revealed.

Hits are marked with an X, while misses are marked with an O.

The user will have 15 attempts to sink all the computer's ships. The lives will reset after a Hit!.

The user wins when all the computer's ships are sunk. Otherwise, the computer wins! There is a scoreboard to track user and computer score.

• Random board generation

  • Ship placements retrieved from list of random co-ordinates on Google Sheets
  • The user cannot see where the computer's ship placements are

  

• Play against the computer

• Accepts user input

• Retrieves and updates scoreboard from Google Sheets.

• Validates user input

  • You cannot enter co-ordinates outside of the grid
  • You must enter a string in alphanumeric grid format
  • You cannot enter special characters

  

• Utilized OOP

• Allow the user to select difficulty
  • Allow user to change number of attempts
  • Allow user to pick number and size of ships.

I created the below flow chart in Lucidchart. This helped me design the game logically and keep flow iteration user friendly.

I used a Battlequips class as my model. The game creates an instance of the class when the user decides to start a game. This class holds the state of the board.

The Battlequips class stores grid size, number of ships, ship co-ordinates, board and number of user lives. The board stores the details of each co-ordinate - hit, miss or empty.

The class also has methods to help play the game, such as print_board to print out the current state of the board, and update_board to update the state of the board after the user gives a valid co-ordinate.

The ship co-ordinates, scoreboard and quips are stored in a Google Sheet which are accessed via their API. The ship co-ordinates are retrieved when creating the Battlequips class. The scoreboard is retrieved and updated at the end of a game.

I have manually tested my project by doing the following:

• Passed the code through a PEP8 linter and confirmed there are no problems
• Given invalid inputs: special characters and off-grid attacks where A1-J0 alphanumeric grid is expected
• Tested in my local terminal and the Code Institute Heroku terminal
• Gave link to my personal QAs - AKA, my family :-)

• When I was testing my project, I was testing for the user to try again after a loss, and when the board reprinted, the co-ordinate values of the previous game remained. I had to clear the board by reassigning the board of the Battlequips class instance to an empty nested array, thankfully solving my problem.
• My validator method wasn't working as I initially intended - I used isalpha instead of isalnum when checking if the characters were alphanumeric. This was resulting in valid co-ordinates returning as invalid.

• The user can input co-ordinates they have already established as a Hit!, and it will then register as a Miss!. This may be difficult for the user to keep track of what they have hit so far, but a miss makes sense logically as they have already hit the co-ordinate, thus losing a life. I may consider changing this in the future when creating feature to change difficulty.

• PEP8
  • No errors returned from PEP8online.com

This project was deployed using Code Institute's mock terminal for Heroku.

• Steps for deployment:
  • Fork or clone this repository
  • Create a new Heroku app
  • Set the buildbacks to Python & NodeJS respectively
  • Link the Heroku app to the repository
  • Click on Deploy

• Special thanks to my girlfriend Grace for support and guidance throughout the project
• Code Institute for the deployment terminal
• Wikipedia for the details of the Battleship game
• Online tutorials such as W3, Geekforgeek and Stack Overflow
• My family for being a superb QA team