AppAcademy had us coding some games today! Specifically, Mastermind and Hangman.

When my pair Brittney and I started this we had both never heard of mastermind; so that was the first challenge. Turns out mastermind is pretty straight forward AND it’s actually a really cool game.

Let me explain the rules of mastermind first…

You basically have a board that allows for 10 turns. There’s a code-maker and a code-breaker. The board has 4 columns and a row for each of the 10 turns. Each row (or turn) also includes a “correctness area” (just baked that term up fresh) for the code-maker to indicate how many of the 4 were wrong, near or correct; I’ll explain those soon. For our purposes the computer was the code-maker.

The code-maker’s role is to make a secret “code” that consists of 4 colors selected from a list of 6 available options. Once the code-maker has selected a code he keeps it a secret and allows the code-breaker to guess it.

As I mentioned above, the code-breaker gets 10 attempts to crack the code. Each time he makes a guess he sets 4 colors from the 6 available on the row corresponding to his turn. At that point, the code-maker takes a look at the code-breaker’s choices and using the “correctness area” indicates if any of his/her choices were exact, near or wrong.

If a choice was exact, meaning the color and column selected were correct, a black marker is placed in the “correctness area”.
If a choice was near, meaning the code-breaker selected a correct color but didn’t place it in the correct spot, a grey dot is placed in the “correctness area”.
If a choice is flat in every sense, meaning it’s a color not used in the code, then we do nothing.

If the code-breaker guesses the code before the 10 turns are over, he wins! woot!

Our implementation basically had 3 classes a Computer (the code-maker), a Player (code breaker) and a Game class that actually “played” the game.

The full source is as follows: