Inspiration
We wanted to make a game and a web app but have little experience with intensive graphical games so we figured some kind of guessing game would work well. I had seen a video about a guy who used the twitter api to buy stuff on amazon and thought that maybe we could use the twitter api to make some sort of game and then thought about just a fill-in-the-blank game
What it does
It allows the player to select a twitter user and then it will go to twitter and grab 5 tweets from that user. Then it will remove one of the words and add a blank space. You then have to guess what word was left out
How we built it
Node.js hosts the server. The player enters a username which is sent to the server and then the server builds a link to query twitter with. Then the server parses that json data into tweets and their ids. Then it picks 5 random tweets from that list that have more than 4 words and have at least one word larger than 3 letters in it. These are sent to the player for them to guess
Challenges we ran into
GitHub was not cooperating at first. Then the issue of needing authentication to query twitter's api. Even once we got a dev account for twitter it was too difficult to query the database directly. So we found a roundabout way of getting json data from twitter itself without the api. Then we wanted to embed the tweets into our site so that it would look like a real tweet. However, we figured that twitter doesn't want you to edit the text of a tweet you're embedding (after many attempts). So we decided to stick with plain text so that it would work. Then we had to fix all the weird characters and \n's
Accomplishments that we're proud of
-Getting json data directly from twitter for any public account that the player wants
-It's kinda fun especially picking people whose tweets you are familiar with
-Figuring out all the weird regular expressions
What we learned
-The twitter api is not as friendly as some of the others that we used in class
-How to get json data from twitter without the api
-How to better use regular expressions
What's next for I have the best words
-Multiplayer functionality
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.