WordSmithGame

Overview

Welcome to Word Smith: a multiplayer, word-centric, mind-teaser game!

In this game you can challenge your friends and see who can come up with the most words, from a collection of shuffled letters, in 2 minutes.

The rules of the game are as follows:

• When the game starts, each player must enter their first and last name
• A random word will be chosen from the english dictionary, the letters of this word will be shuffled, and the player will be shown the shuffled letters.
• In 2 minutes, the player must come up with as many words as he or she can using these letters.
• If a submitted word is a valid, english word, 2 points will be added to the player's score, and if an invalid word is submitted, 2 points will be deducted. If the player correctly guess the word that was selected from the english dictionary before the letters were shuffled (in the first step), he or she will be granted 10 points.
• At the end of 2 minutes, the player will be notified that time is up, what his or her final score is, and which player has scored the highest thus far in the round.
• At this time a new player can join the game, or the same player can play again by entering "Y" when the game asks "would like to start a new game?". If "N" is entered, the round will terminate.

To start a game, use the following commands in your client:

WordSmith newGames; newGames.newRoundofGames();

To end a game, simply press “N” when prompted at the end of the first-round.

How To Play

To play, download the files in this repository and in your terminal type the following: ("$" should not be typed, it's there to represent your terminal command line) $ make $./output

And then begin playing.

Implementation

The game was written in C++. A Trie data structure (prefix trees) was used to store and search through an English dictionary, as well as to store and search trough words submitted by players.

Why Use a Trie?

Why use a trie? The cost for insertion and searching within a trie is O(k) where k is the length of the word being inserted or searched for. Therefore, a trie can be used to store an entire dictionary in relatively little time. Construction and searching can be complete in a maximum of O(M) time where M is the largest word in the dictionary. Additionally, when searching for a word we can either search with a single letter, a prefix, or the word itself.

While other data structures such as hash tables may be viable alternatives, they do not allow for prefix searching which makes the trie especially well suit for this application.

To-Do

This came was completed for a class project, and there are improvement that will make this project's design neater and more efficient. Some "to-do's" are listed below:

• The WordSmith class is too large. Some of the elements could be broken up into smaller classes and WordSmith could then be composed of those classes using composition.
• Develop a user interface.