Hangman

Complete beginner's tutorial to Clojure.

This tutorial is for Clojure newbies. It guides you through the process of creating a playable and production ready hangman game.

Prerequisites

Prerequisites for this tutorial include:

• git
• leiningen
• IDE which supports Clojure REPL and can evaluate selected expressions from source file in REPL

See notes on tooling for some info about leiningen and emacs.

How to study this tutorial

• clone this repository with git clone git://github.com/wagjo/hangman.git
• Launch your favorite IDE and open hangman source files in order given below
• Study files from top to bottom, line by line
  • evaluate files and expressions in comments
  • think, experiment, read official docs and ClojureDocs

Lets begin

Study introductory clojure tutorials:

1. introductory presentation
2. src/tutorial/core.clj

Study hangman source files:

1. src/hangman/words.clj
2. src/hangman/solver.clj
3. src/hangman/game.clj
4. src/hangman/core.clj
5. src/hangman/desktop.clj
6. src/hangman/main.clj
7. project.clj

How to run the game

Type lein run to run the game.

Package game

• Type lein uberjar
• Run packaged game with java -jar ./hangman-1.0.0-standalone.jar
  • or doubleclick on hangman-1.0.0-standalone.jar :)

Challenges

Following is the list of challenges to improve hangman game. They are not ordered by difficulty and they range from easy to very hard. These challenges require knowledge of Clojure beyond what is explained in this tutorial.

• modify words.clj so it does not read from file every time word is requested, but only once.
• modify words.clj so it will never return same word twice, yet it will return a random word from the list.
• modify words.clj so that word list is not in external file, but inside words.clj. Create word list without tedious manual writing.
• make game harder by counting repeated guesses of same wrong letter not just once. For example, guessing \a \c \c on "floor" will decrement number of guesses left by 3.
• when writing wrong guesses, write "A, B and C", instead of "A, B, C"
• write "one guess left" instead of "1 left"
• write "no guesses left" instead of "0 left"
• track number of games won and number of games played and display it after each game.
• persists game statistics to disk or database, and continue game where it was left.
• persists game data into graph database
• create user profiles. When game starts, ask for user name and load his profile.
• make profiles password protected.
• make password storage safe by using bcrypt.
• make 3 types of difficulty. user can choose between easy, normal and hard. Difficulty will determine number of guesses and length of the words. Place all global game configuration settings in separate .clj file.
• use different GUI library
• port Hangman to ClojureScript
• port Hangman to Clojure-CLR
• create web app port of Hangman
• make the server part of web app port to run on node.js
• port Hangman to Android
• support multiple concurrent players
• support multiplayer game, so that players guess one word together
• draw a nice hangman, updating his limbs as the game progresses
• implement scoring system, which will score game based on number of wrong guesses
• support hints. At each game, user can request for one hint, which will reveal one correct letter. Lower game score when player uses a hint.
• implement leaderboard, showing 10 best players

License

Copyright (C) 2012, Jozef Wagner.

The use and distribution terms for this software are covered by the Eclipse Public License 1.0 (http://opensource.org/licenses/eclipse-1.0.php) which can be found in the file epl-v10.html at the root of this distribution.

By using this software in any fashion, you are agreeing to be bound by the terms of this license.

You must not remove this notice, or any other, from this software.