PHP/Javascript Crossword Game Tutorial
Do you like word games? Today’s game tests your crossword skills in English. It uses English words, based on the dictionary arrangements at its (web) server. Maybe it would be a good game to help learn some English vocabulary.
Programmers often use Linux dictionary files as a means to get a word list, and that list could be in any language, and for ours it is English, so to make it for another language, change the code inside the file_get_contents() call in crossword.php
This game has two parts to it for PHP and Javascript to respectively create the crossword words to use and arrange the user interaction.
Hopefully you can figure the rules when you click the picture above for a live run, in that you are asked to supply the missing letters in the crossword grid presented to you, by clicking on an unsolved crossword grid letter. You score if you complete the crossword, but be warned, without “peeking”, it is not easy.
A big thanks goes to wordplay|com for help with the clues. This website contains amazing ideas.
Another big thanks goes to “Text Types in English” by Mark Anderson and Kathy Anderson for the idea for the shape of the crossword grid, and so, with the design of the program.
And yet another thank you to The Free Dictionary for its great online presence as a dictionary resource, for the functionality to point at a completed (coloured box) word, for its dictionary meaning (where it can … some words are a tad too esoteric … but am about to warn you it could be hard). The image map “click parts of the picture” vocabulary ESL tutorials at this blog use the same resource to explain dictionary information about clicked on “things”.
Anyway, see how you go with this very challenging crossword game!
Here is a link to some downloadable PHP (with Javascript) programming code you could rename to crossword.php
If this was interesting you may be interested in this too.
