Back in 2017, things were more simple. I had less homework and a lot more free time. I was also taking AP Computer Science A in high school, in which there was an end-of-the-year project where each student would create a game with a GUI using the Java Swing framework. For my game, I decided to make [Battleship!](https://github.com/alanqchen/Battleship), primarily because at the time I loved playing World of Warships (and is the source of the background art in the game).

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This isn’t going to be a too long description as this was created three years ago and I don’t remember everything, but I think it’s cool to look back upon what I consider to be my first project.

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# The Game

The game, like nearly every game, starts off with the main menu:

![](https://i.imgur.com/Z8zCgoH.png)

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It has a large central JButton to start the game, and three smaller buttons on the bottom for exit, help, and settings respectively. And if the user couldn’t visually tell the functions of the buttons, a tooltip will be displayed after hovering on the button. As an extra feature, the whole game is run borderless for a nicer visual presentation.

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As the name implies, the exit button exits the game. Help opens a window describing how to play:

![](https://i.imgur.com/xqQ3x2C.png)

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And the settings window has a bit more interesting functionality:

![](https://i.imgur.com/zpugFho.png)

Here, the user can select the difficulty of the CPU, which medium being the default and currently selected option in the screenshot above. Admittedly, the CPU difficulties are simple, with the following behavior:

* Easy: CPU always chooses a random square to fire at, even after a hit
* Medium: CPU randomly chooses a random square to fire at until a hit, where then it smartly start firing at adjacent squares until the target is sunk
* Hard: CPU has “cheats” and knows where you placed your ships

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The only way to win on hard mode is to never miss a shot, and I’d be shocked if someone was lucky enough to beat the CPU at that difficulty!

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Now, onto setting up the game. The first step in Battleship is to place your ships:

![](https://i.imgur.com/kmqnZE5.png)

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In the screenshot above, the aircraft carrier (yellow) and battleship (blue) have already been placed by the user. The user would left click to place the ship horizontally, and right click to place it vertically. The ship they were currently placing is displayed at the bottom, and there are buttons to confirm (after all ships have been placed), reset, and exit.

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Once the placement of ships is confirmed, the game can start!

![](https://i.imgur.com/iHiY7H0.png)

One of the most memorable things about this project was how I made the board. It essentially is a grid of buttons which use an image as their icon. But usually the image is smaller than the size of the button itself, so I had to hackily give it negative “margin” to cover up the button. Additionally, you may have noticed that in the pictures the horizontal grid lines are not visible. This probobly is because of macOS or a new version of Java since I swear they were visible before ;).

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Anyway, this was a really fun final project, and it was also fun playing my fellow student’s games. Shoutout to Mr. McKeen for a great class!

Alan Chen

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Battleship

Looking back at my first project

September 2nd, 2020 (updated September 4th, 2020)