Master Word

Master Word

Inspiration

Every member of our team loves solving puzzles. We came across a game called mastermind, for which we loved the concept, but the experience of playing that game was not good. We wanted to build a puzzle game, that would challenge anyone who plays it, providing just enough hints as to tease the player with information such as how close they are to the real answer, yet leaving them scratching their heads on how to reach it.

What it does

Master Word is a word game, that allows you to test your puzzle skills while teasing you by giving you the information about how close you are to the answer. A word is picked at random by the computer from the English dictionary which the player is supposed to guess. The guess can only be a valid English word. The player gets a fixed number of tries for every word, and after each guess, the player is told how many alphabets in their guess overlap the ones in the given word, and moreover, how many of them are in the right position, thus acting as hints and enabling the player to solve the puzzle. After all tries are exhausted, if the player is unable to guess the word, the word will be revealed to them, and they can play again with a different word.

The player has the option to change the length of the word according to their difficulty requirements. There are 3 options : 3 letter word with 6 allowed guesses (Easy), 5 letter word with 10 allowed guesses (Medium) and 7 letter word with 10 allowed guesses (Hard).

If the player guesses the correct word, then congratulations are in order 🎉, and they can play the game again with a different word.

How we built it

We built it as a website, using React and Material UI as the main front end and JS for the web interaction and API calls. We used a dictionaryAPI made available on the internet for random word picking and checking if the word entered by the user is : firstly a valid word of the english lexicon, and secondly if it is equal to the word picked by the computer.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced was to find a working API and implement it correctly as per our idea. We tried a lot of different APIs facing different challenges with them all, finally finding dictionaryAPI after a lot of work.

Moreover, figuring out the correct balance of how to make the game tough, but at the same time keep it interesting and captivating was difficult.

Adding different word lengths was challenging, since we had to customise our webpage completely, according to the word length selected by the player.

Mapping out and implementing each small detail with precision, finding the bugs, and making an attractive UI was challenging as well as time consuming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have delivered a fully functional game, with a decent UI and implementation, to the best of our knowledge, given the time constraint. Figuring out small details and bug fixes was challenging yet extremely enjoyable.

Finding and implementing an API for our game is something we are proud of, given its time consuming and unreliable nature.

What's next for Master Word

We can incorporate features such as challenging and competing with other friends, sharing our scores, and finding out where you stand on the leaderboard. This game can be made very competitive, and we can expect this game to grow to reach everyone and be enjoyed by all.

We can make an app as well for this game, to take this game from desktop to mobile, so everyone can play this on the go.

Features like word of the day etc. can make the app more interactive and knowledgeable to play everyday.

Master Word is a game for all, and we want everyone to try and challenge themselves with this game, which we believe is really fun and enjoyable!