word-reveal

A game where a word is slowly revealed

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Instructions

Displays

On the screen, you will see many displays.

Total Score

Your total score is displayed above the yellow bar at the bottom. The yellow bar will show your total score too: it will scale based on how many total points you have. If you have 300 or more, it will cover the entire width of the canvas.

Round Score

In each round, your score is displayed, above the vertical bar on the left.

Time in Round

The green vertical bar will show how much time is left in the round. If it covers the red completely, the round just started. If it's half way down the red, so is the word cover (as well as the round). If the green bar is no longer visible, the round has ended.

Rules

In each round, you start with 70 round points. This steadily decreases. Each time you make an incorrect guess, 20 round points will be deducted. When the round ends, the result is added to the total points.

The total points will begin at 50. To win, at the end of the game you must have 300 points.

If at any time your total points become 0 or below, you lose.

To make a guess, type what you think the word is through your keyboard. To remove multiple letter, you can't just hold down "backspace". To make it harder, you must press and release the backspace key for each letter you wish to remove. To submit your answer, hit the return key.

Programming

To help you, the code is split into three files.

constants.js

A file that contains all the numeric constants.

• The score needed to win at the end (TARGET)
• How many rounds are needed (and therefore how many words must be fetched) (ROUNDS)
• How many seconds are in each round (ROUND_DURATION)
• The character code for the enter key, which is 13. (ENTER)
• The character code for the backspace key, which is 8. (BACKSPACE)

canvasFunctions.js

A file that contains all the functions that manipulate the canvas to draw game objects.

Note that all these functions must take the CanvasRenderingContext2D as the first argument; and must take the HTML canvas element as the second argument. These are implied in the table below.

Function name	Arguments	What it does
display	text to display background behind text colour of text	Shows only the given text, in the centre of the canvas, over a certain background.
drawWord	percentage of round left (0 to 100) hidden word colour of word colour of cover (i.e. solid rectangle that obscures word)	Renders the round's word onto the canvas, covered by a solid rectangle of the size and colours specified.
drawBackground	colour of background	Covers the entire canvas with a solid rectangle of the colour specified.
drawCounter	percentage of round left (0 to 100) points lost by incorrect guesses colour of time left colour of time used	Renders the vertical counter using the percentage argument. Renders the round's score using both the percentage *and* the points lost.
drawTotal	total score colour of bar colour of label	Renders the total score in the bar at the bottom, using the colour specified. Also, attaches a numeric label to show the score as an absolute number rather than as a visual fraction of the target.

index.js

A file that handles the main game loop.

getWords(rounds)

This returns a promise, which should only ever resolve. Ideally, it should pull from an online database of words; however, it may fallback to a hard-coded list if there is no internet connection.

nextRound()

Upgrades the round in the gameState object and resets the round's score, penalty, etc.

roundCheck(ctx, canvas)

This takes the ctx and canvas arguments, even though it doesn't directly manipulate the canvas. Instead, it will call display with relevant arguments that will depend on whether the game is a loss or a win.

This function will do nothing if the game hasn't reached an end.

gameState

gameState is an object containing the state of the game.

total

The total number of points

round

The index of the round

points

This is actually counter-intuitive. The points is the percentage of the round yet to complete. If there are no wrong guesses, this happens to be the number of points the user gets. To calculate the user's points, one must subtract the penalty

penalty

The number which, when subtracted from points, is the round's points. This starts at 30 because 100 - 30 = 0.

startedAt

The high-quality timestamp since the page loaded (roughly) when the game initially started.

text

The text which a user has entered through their keyboard but not submitted yet

General structure

The constants and canvas functions are imported. Then, getWords(ROUNDS) is called. The promise is resolved, and when that happens a series of things will happen.

Firstly, the game loop is declared.

Secondly, event listeners are binded to document

The game loop runs the following:

• Has the game ended? If so, call roundCheck(CTX, C) and quit the game loop.
• Draw the background, total score counter, round score counter, round timer, and the concealed word
• Lower the number of time in the round remaining
• If the time for this round has run out, move on to the next round
• Tell the browser you're ready for the next game tick
• Draw the inputted text to the screen so the user knows what they're typing

The event listener keypress runs:

• Figure out the keycode of the key that has just been pressed, in a cross-browser way
• If it's not backspace, add it to the text property in gameState

The event listener keydown runs:

• Figure out the keycode of the key that has just been pressed, in a cross-browser way
• If it's ENTER (13)
  • Trim off any newline characters (\r is the annoying one)
  • Compare it with the target word
  • If it's a match
    • Run nextRound()
  • Otherwise
    • Clear the text and add 20 to the penalty property of gameState
• If it's BACKSPACE (8)
  • Remove the rightmost character, if it exists, from the text property of gameState