Association Game

Inspiration

I've always quite liked word games and have fond memories of playing such things with my family during long road trips. However, as I got older such basic games became more and more boring as my vocabulary and thinking skills expanded. Despite that, I still think that such games are quite interesting and valuable as they teach you to think abstractly about words and can help expand your vocabulary as well. As such, I wanted to build a game that still retained that sort of thinking but was more structured and interesting to play.

What it does

The game play for this game is quite simple to understand. Players play in 2 teams, taking turns to open clues on the board. After opening a clue, the team that opened it has a chance to guess what word that clue is associated with or the final solution to the board. Each of the middle solutions has 4 clues associated with it, and these 4 middle solutions in turn are associated with the final solution. The fewer clues for a specific word that are opened, the more points that word is worth for the team that guesses it. The game goes until the final solution is guessed and a winner is determined.

How we built it

I wrote the backend for this game using java. When the program runs, a board is randomly generated from a text file containing lists of words and words associated with those words. Then the game can be interacted with using either the graphic interface or the command line, depending on which version of the game is being run.

Challenges we ran into

I originally made the game with a purely command line interface. However, I felt that it looked quite clunky and I could not properly convey and update all the information the user was supposed to know in a smooth and convenient manner. As such, I needed to create a graphic component for the game. I wrote the backend of the game entirely in java and had no experience with using any sort of graphics in the language, so it was quite a challenge to learn all the classes and methods needed to do so in the limited time I had during this hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am quite happy that this game can be played both in the command line and with a graphic interface using very similar code. I initially wrote the code to play on the command line since I had no experience with making graphic interfaces in java. However, once I had learned enough about the topic and written a class to make the game's graphics, I was able to reuse almost all the same backend code I had developed for the first implementation.

What we learned

Before I started this project, I had no experience at all with using JFrames and other non command line interfaces with java. Now, I feel confident using that sort of java code and understand how it functions.

What's next for Association Game

With the basic gameplay elements all created, the main thing needed to further develop this game is a more elaborate set of associations for use in generating the board. For the purposes of this project I put together a small text file with a highly limited number of possible words with which to generate boards. If I want this game to help people think and learn however, I need a much larger pool of words and associations to pull from.

Built With

• java