Hangman

The classic game brought to life with Ruby, Sinatra, and Bootstrap 3.

Play the game here on Heroku.

About the game

• Words
  • The game uses a library of words provided in /resources/enable.txt
  • This word list is used to populate an array $words in /resources/words.rb
  • This file and array are built using a small ruby script in /resources/build.rb
  • $words is an array of child arrays that contain words with string lengths equal to the value of the index of the child array in $words
• Difficulty
  • The difficulty selection is enabled and populated only with the index of child arrays that are not empty
  • When the user selects a difficulty, the Game object uses this integer to select a child array from $words
• Word
  • The word choosen for each game is selected randomly by a 2 fold method:
    1. Generating a random index using rand() with the size of the array as the argument
    2. Shuffling the word array before retrieving a word from it with the above random index
• State
  • The Game class in /lib/game.rb uses the Sinatra params object to determine the state of the game
  • The state keeps track of:
    • The last guessed letter
    • All other letter guesses
    • Difficulty selected
• Scoring
  • Player lives are set directly equal to 5 - ${INCORRECT_GUESSES}
  • The game is lost after 5 incorrect guesses are made
  • The game is won when all letters have been correctly guessed
• Art
  • Art work is completely ASCII and output in a <pre> tag to preserve white-space
  • The art work changes color from green to red with each lost life
• Hidden Cheat
  • The game is equipped with a hidden cheat to view the current word for debugging and fun of course

Structure and design

• Routes
  • There is only 1 GET route used: '/'
  • The game is completely reliant on form input parameters being preserved in the URL
  • While POST would be more secure from tampering, I wanted to use GET as an exercise
• Ruby
  • While JavaScript could provide more interaction and indeed be used to run this game entirely, I chose specifically to not use it
  • The logic and calculations for this game are all delibrately written in Ruby

I hope you enjoy Hangman!

Bideo Wego