So hot on the heels of my return to Hive after a little break, some of you know I've come back swinging with Hive apps. It's not that I dislike writing content for Hive, I just feel like apps are more fun than writing a bunch of words (and being seen in the feed when you write here is very difficult).
Anyway...
I've been working on a new game for Hive and it's the classic game of battleship (inspired by the old game you might have played in physical form or in the form of an app). The idea is both players wager a couple of HIVE tokens that go into the prize pool, you place your ships and then you battle each other. Winner takes the pot.
As you can imagine, there is a little more to a game of battleship than random number generation like the lottery game I launched recently. This requires storing grid positions, keeping track of moves and other facets whilst ensuring the enemy sees none of these things.
The hardest part of this has actually been getting the UI right. I keep going back and forth on how it should look styling wise and the version you see here is probably the final version (maybe) or close to the final version.
This is the deployment screen the grid is a 10x10 grid you can place ships horizontally or vertically.
While the game hasn't officially launched just yet, if you're feeling brave and willing to lose 2 HIVE tokens, you can actually visit https://hive-ships.com now and try it out. It still needs polish, but I'll happily battle some people if they're down.
There's still a chance there are weird bugs I haven't discovered yet and the flow for when you create games, etc, is still a bit weird. But it would be nice to get some testers if you're game to be a super early player.
Comments (2)
Heh, you are quite active. Did you develop these in the few days since you came back or you started before?
Feedback: two player games often benefit from some kind of in-game chat, and invitation mechanic so I can play with an exact user instead of some random opponent
The lottery game was developed in a couple of days. The battleship game is something I had kicking around from like 3 years ago funnily enough. I had a bit of the logic in there that I didn't even need to change, it just worked. But there was no UI, so I've been hacking away at the UI for about 2.5 weeks on and off (the lottery app was a distraction to stop me going crazy).
Funnily enough, the lottery game just uses code I copied from the battleship game, but made to apply to the lottery game (which just streams the blockchain and looks for specific values to capture for processing).
I'm actually working on the invitation mechanics now, but it's on a separate branch to the current stuff as I was going to make everything use web components at one point and sidelined some things.
I don't even want to look at it; I have had a similar idea brewing for many years 😌