14 Project: Develop a word game in React
This chapter covers
- Solving a complex challenge by breaking it down
- Choosing your own stack
This chapter is the end of the line, the big finale, the grand exam. It has been quite a journey, and we’ve covered a lot of ground. In this last challenge, you’ll be mostly on your own. I will help with some of the meta decisions on tackling the project, but I won’t discuss any code. But I have a lot of faith in you. You can do it! Go, team!
Note The source code for the example in this chapter is available at https://reactlikea.pro/ch14.
14.1 Building a game
You’ll be building a certain five-letter word-guessing game. You’ve probably heard of it. This game could end up looking like figure 14.1.
Figure 14.1 My implementation of the word game ended up looking something like this (but only in dark mode, this figure is an approximate conversion to light mode for print purposes). I didn't fare too well in this round and barely managed to get the answer in five words.
14.2 Choose your ambition
Before you start, it’s a good idea to choose your ambition level. The application consists of two equally complex parts:
- The game engine, with a keyboard and a grid, allows you to guess a specified word.
- The web application around the game engine picks a daily word, remembers whether you’ve already played today (and if so, what happened), remembers past results, and provides statistics. It also welcomes new players.