In the game of battleships, the game play area is a square grid containing ships. Players take it in turns to guess the location of the ships until the battleship is sunk.
A simple solution has been provided that has the basics of rendering a grid and asking for input. It does not look very pretty.
Your assignment is to improve on the rendering and complete the input part of the gameplay.
1. Improve the rendering so that each grid square is represented by a box created out of characters.
e.g.
#---#
| |
#---#
2. Improve the rendering so that each ship type is in a different color. Ships should be visible, not hidden from view. Yes, that's a bad game but we are just using this to test our algorithms and design.
e.g.
#---#
| S |
#---#
3. Improve the rendering so that the grid has horizontal labels (A through J) and vertical labels (1 through 10)
4. Parse the input to get the guess in the form LetterNumber e.g. B7, G10, A1. You will find String.SubString and Int32.TryParse to be useful API calls. Invalid input should cause the input to be asked again - it should not be possible to crash your program with bad input
5. When you have a valid input mark the grid location as used and then render an X in the square to indicate it has been used. The X should be Red if it was a hit on a ship.
e.g.
Miss Hit
#---# #---#
| X | | X |
#---# #---#
Notes:
· Your grid rendering must display the ships. At this stage we are just testing parts of the game so we don't need them hidden from the user. (and it makes it much harder for one of your users to grade!)
· You do not need to determine end of game conditions, validate repeated hits or any gameplay however feel free to add any of those things if you feel the urge.
· There are many useful APIs in the Console class. You may render the grid line by line using Write and WriteLine or you may render it using the SetCursorPosition API. You may redraw the entire grid each time or simply replace the sections that have changed.
· You may find it useful to set the size of the console window to something a little larger. There are APIs to do this in the Console class. The example above is just one style of drawing - feel free to experiment with different characters and grid sizes.