Textris

Inspiration

For the first few hours, we flailed around looking for something we could understand and create with our limited programming knowledge. While we were brainstorming, I came up with the idea for Angry Word, a permutation of Angry Bird with letters replacing the pigs and the player needing to shoot a slingshot through letters in order to find a word. However, Armin suggested a version of Tetris, as he was looking at games that could be coded in Python. After our team investigated previously coded versions of both games, we decided that Tetris would be easier to manipulate.

What it does

Textris is similar to Tetris in that pieces fall from the sky, but unlike Tetris, those pieces are letters. The board is spaced so that each row accommodates three letters, and the goal for the user, ideally a preschool or kindergarten student, is to arrange those pieces into easy to recognize sight words. The soundtrack is classical music in order to boost learning (despite many studies debunking that, I believe it would still be beneficial for kids to hear). The game is intended to make sight-word learning more fun and interactive than flashcards, which is how me and my sister learned.

How I built it

Armin found source code for a python version of Tetris, which our team then manipulated. Specific modifications included omitting the rotation feature in order to simplify the game for kids, including instructions on screen, creating letter templates for the blocks, reformatting text, resizing the board, and creating a word dictionary player results were compared to.

Challenges I ran into

Since all of my team had only taken ECS 10 prior to this assignment, a lot of the APIs & code available to us were difficult to understand. I also had difficulty connecting the Python game to the html file I created, since I had never bridged the gap between them, as well as implementing a check for Textris wins (i.e. word completion).

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Though all the rest of my team went home around 12, I stayed throughout the night and coded my first web-page completely in vim, with zero experience in web development, which was meant to be a display for Textris, a web-browser-based game. I was also able to fix a number of issues, including random choice looping when it wasn't supposed to and pygame messing up newlines & print formatting.

What I learned

I learned how to install modules (specifically pygame) through using pip, as well, and gained experience reading code written by more advanced developers.

What's next for Textris

I plan to continue developing Textris through expanding its word dictionary, fixing the win check, connecting it to my HTML file (& making that file/webpage more aesthetically pleasing), and creating different levels of difficulty for the user to continue learning.