Final Project in Scala: Codewords

Dr. Kennington

Anna Rift

CS 354

2020-05-01

Running the Game

1. Codewords uses the build tool sbt. Download and install sbt from here.
2. I recommend using Java 8 for compatibility reasons. Newer versions are likely to work, but Codewords was only tested with Java 8, and Scala may not play as nice with them.
3. (optional) If you would like Codewords to retrieve random words from the Wordnik API, an API key must be set (with export) in the environment variable WORDNIK_API_KEY. Wordnik API keys can be requested here. You could try using the key c23b746d074135dc9500c0a61300a3cb7647e53ec2b9b658e, which is used for the samples in the documentation. If no key is defined, a backup set of 25 words will be used. Note that randomly retrieved words may be offensive.
4. (optional) The 'difficulty' of retrieved words can be adjusted by changing the WORD_MIN_DIFFICULTY environment variable, which sets the minCorpusCount parameter used in the call to the Wordnik API. If not defined, the value of 20000 will be used. If word retrieval is not being used (or fails), this option has no effect.
5. Clone this repository, navigate to the project root and run the command $ sbt run. This may take an especially long time the first time it is run.
6. That's it! When sbt is done and the app is ready, the message (Server started, use Enter to stop and go back to the console...) will appear on the console. It can be viewed at http://localhost:9000. Compilation will be triggered the first time the page is visited, so it will take an unusually long time to load. Since the game is for 4 players, if you'd like to play by yourself you'll need to open up four copies of the page.

Demonstration

A recorded demonstration of the game is available on YouTube here.

A live version of the app is hosted on Heroku here, for as long as I keep it up (no guarantees). It has the random word retrieval functionality working. This is the site used in the recorded demonstration. As the app only supports one concurrent game, if other users are online at the same time as you they may interfere (or you could play a round with them!).