BotWars is an event I've run at my company. They are huge team building events of around 50 or 60 engineers who compete in randomly drawn teams (usually with a lot of pizza) in a competition. These are a huge amount of fun and help engineers meet and work alongside colleagues they may not have know ordinarily.

Bottleships is the 4th iteration of BotWars, it's based on the children's game of Battleships and teams will have to write an application which places their ships (harder than it sounds) and targets their shooting at each other's fleets.

For earlier versions of BotWars take a look at BotWars and BotWars2 (I didn't develop BotWars3, I got to play). You're more than welcome to download, contribute, or run these at your own company.

This year the game is based on the game of Battleships, with each team creating an AI which competes against the others to prove it is the best admiral of the virtual seas.

The game is very much in the early versions:

With very basic graphics

And a distinctly "retro" menu feel

Functionally it's there, but there are lots of UI and playability improvements which need to be made. I'm hoping to run this event and so hope to have a working version developed by then.

There are a few tweaks to make the game more interesting and harder for our teams:

• Each fleet will get one shot per surviving ship per turn, rather than the traditional shot per turn
• I'm hoping you'll be able to move your ships mid game (nice to have)
• In traditional Battleships you play against one other opponent, in Bottleships we can have 1v1 games and 1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1 games!

We will have four rounds played over a single afternoon. Players will be put into teams at around 12pm and they'll have limited time to get their first version up and running. Scores will be cumulative so winning the final round will not guarantee overall victory. The winner will be the best scoring team across the day.

The day will look something like this:

• Draw Teams (and lunch) @ 12pm
• Round 1 @1:30pm
• Round 2 @2:30pm
• Round 3 & 4 @3:30pm
• Close & Prizes @ 4pm

Take a look at the Issues Page where I'm adding details of what I'm working on next.

Of course! The game is under the MIT Licence, I'd recommend you wait until it's finished first though!