A friend of mine wants to do a local version of “The Wheel of Fortune” on TV and since they don’t want to spend a fortune to build the set <g>, they decided to do the puzzle squares by having them projected on the wall from a computer screen 🙂 So guess who was asked to come up with the actual program that would display the puzzle squares on the computer screen? Yes, moi :p I’ve been working on a prototype for the past couple of days and had something workable – nothing major, a full-screen app that simply draws a grid on the computer screen. You can customize the background, the fill color for the squares and the font that the letters are displayed in.
I showed it to my friend and he agrees that it’s on the correct track but he wants actual squares instead of a grid, he wants the squares with a correctly identified letter to blink and reveal a letter at a time instead of simply revealing the letters as they are typed and a host of other modifications. Not really sure that it’s an interesting project at this point since there isn’t too much of a challenge to it and I’ve done most of the basic work. I have a feeling that I’ll have to change the way certain things are done, however. Currently, I keep track of each typed letter and if it is in the current word and is not a duplicate, I add it to an array which is used later in displaying the letters. Since I’ll be drawing squares, I feel that it’ll probably be easier to come up with a structure to keep the coordinates of each square rather than to calculate them on the go each time. If I create such a structure, I could also probably keep track of the letters displayed in each square and whether they are visible or not …