Q-Words

Overview

Q-Words is a web-based word guessing game built using the Spring Boot framework. The objective of the game is to guess a randomly selected word within a limited number of attempts.

How to Play

1. Open the Q-Words application in your web browser.
2. The game will select a random word for you to guess.
3. Enter your guess in the provided input field and submit it.
4. The application will provide feedback on your guess:
   • '+' indicates a correct letter in the correct position.
   • '?' indicates a correct letter in the wrong position.
   • 'X' indicates a letter that is not present in the word.
5. Keep making guesses until you either correctly guess the word or run out of attempts.

Rules

• The word to be guessed is randomly selected from a predefined word list.
• You have a maximum of 5 attempts to guess the word correctly.
• Each guess must be a valid word of the same length as the word to be guessed.
• Feedback is provided for each guess, indicating the correctness of the letters and their positions.

Application Code Architecture

Frameworks and Libraries

• Spring Boot: The main framework used for developing the web application.
• Thymeleaf: The templating engine used for rendering the HTML views.
• Lombok: A library used for reducing boilerplate code.
• JUnit: The testing framework used for unit testing.

Game Logic

The game logic is primarily handled in the GameController class. It receives the user's guesses, compares them against the selected word, updates the game state, and returns the appropriate view with the game status and feedback.

Word List Generation

The word list is stored in the WordList class as an ArrayList<String>. The words are currently hard-coded in the constructor of the WordList class. However, this can be easily extended to load the words from an external file or database.

Setting Up the Development Environment

1. Install Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.8. (this is the current version supported)
2. Install Apache Maven build tool.
3. Clone the Q-Words repository from GitHub.
4. Import the project into your preferred IDE (e.g., IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse).
5. Build the project using Maven: mvn clean install.

Running the Game

1. Open a terminal and navigate to the project's root directory.
2. Run the following command to start the application: mvn spring-boot:run.
3. Open a web browser and visit http://localhost:8080 to access the Q-Words game.