/battleship

Primary LanguageRuby

README ↑

  • Simple battleship app in RoR

  • intializes an empty DB, with one table for the games

  • server will support mutiple games simultaneously

  • typical flow would be: create new game, place ships, take turns firing, delete game when done

Writeup ↑

I enjoyed this assignment. It has been a few years since I did rails development, so I used this as an opportunity to brush up. For me, the most challenging part was getting back into the rails state of mind. I was stuck for a little bit figuring out which qualifier I needed for the attributes. Figuring out how to persist a 2d array to the DB, but realizing that I didn’t need anything for the primitive attributes, since they were inferred from the schema. Looking at it now, I would probably have created objects for users and ships, where a game has many (2) users, and users have many (5) ships. This would make authentication/security possible, and the backend can keep track of when a user has completed setup (placing all their ships), when a ship is sunk, and when a game is completed. Currently, I would have to rely on the frontend for that functionality, but they can all be inferred from the available data, although it’s not particularly secure.

API calls (JSON) ↑

  • create new game

GET /games/new

receives no parametes

returns the newly created game (client will need to use the id for subsequent calls). The board is initialized 10x10, with 0,0 being the top/left corner

  • retreive details of a game

GET /games/:id

receives the id of the desired game

returns the details (board state for both players, and damage counts) of the game

  • list all games

GET /games

receives no parameters

returns list of all current games

  • place a ship

POST /games/placeship

receives the following parameters

  1. id: id of the game

  2. player: the player whose board to place the ship on (1 or 2)

  3. orientation: horizontal or vertical ship placement (‘h’ or ‘v’)

  4. shipsize: the size of the ship being placed (2, 3, 4, or 5)

  5. xcoord: x coordinate of the top/left corner of the ship

  6. ycoord: y coordinate of the top/left corner of the ship

returns status and message of succesful or failed ship placement

  • fire (take turn)

POST /games/fire

receives the following parameters

  1. id: id of the game

  2. player: the player whose board to place the ship on (1 or 2)

  3. xcoord: x coordinate of the square to fire on

  4. ycoord: y coordinate of the square to fire on

returns status and message of succesful (hit or miss) or failed (invalid) fire attempt

  • delete a game DELETE /games/:id

receives id of game to be deleted

returns successful or failed deletion

Known issues/improvements ↑

  • Security - there is no authentication, so a user could make an api call to see the other user’s board, or the board in other convurrent games

  • When placing a ship, the app currently uses a naive approach. It could start placing a ship, then error out later, but will leave the part that’s already been placed

  • No tracking of ships that need to be placed, or have already been placed. Currently relying on client for that

  • No tracking of when a ship has been sunk, or the game is over. It is up to the client to see when max damage is reached