Letter Rain is an original interactive PC game developed using the PyGame library. The game tests your focus and vocabulary by challenging you to form words from the falling letters before they sink into the water below. Speed and accuracy are key factors to excel in this game, apart from of course, the slice of luck.
python3 game.py
- Python3
- Pygame
The gameplay is very simple and intuitive. There will be letters falling from the sky into the river below. The objective of the game is to form meaningful words from those letters before it falls into the river and score points. The player can form words by pressing the key in the keyboard corresponding to the falling letter. Once a player is satisfied with the word formed, they can press Return on the keyboard for score counting and then to continue with the next word. At each level, there is a predefined target score that the player must achieve in order to progress to the next level. Each level is of the same fixed duration (defined by LVL_TIMEOUT) of 1 minute. Within this duration the player must achieve a minimum of the target score to progress. Failing to score the minimum level target score will lead to “Game Over”.
- Pause - The player can decide to pause the game at any point in between the level. A pause screen with three options - continue, restart and quit, appear on the screen.
- Music - The game has a background track running in order to make it more interesting. The current background music track is the famous piano piece, “Clair De Lune”. The player can choose to mute the background music at any point during the game. There is a button in the right hand bottom corner to mute/unmute the audio.
- Restart - As mentioned in the pause feature explanation, the player can choose to restart the game at any point during the game by pausing it and pressing on the restart button. The player also has the option to restart even after “Game Over” from the leaderboard.
- Level Countdown - Before the start of each level, there is a countdown timer for 3 seconds which notifies the player that the game is about to start.
- Level Scores - After each level a scoreboard is displayed which tells the player if he/she has won or lost the level. In case the player has won the level, the scoreboard also displays the rating in terms of stars. We have explained more about rating in the Scores & Rating section. A player can also choose to restart the same level if they want to improve their score.
- Leaderboard - After “Game Over” the player is directed to the leaderboard window where they can view the leaders of the game. They can enter their name in the textbox given and see if they have made it among the leaders.
- Display of Words Formed
At the moment there are 10 leves with the target scores of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 65, 70, 75 and 80 respectively. Each level is of a fixed duration of 1 minute within which the player has to score a minimum target score. Even after scoring the minimum target score, the level continues until time runs out during which the player can score additional points with the intent of achieving a high score.
Each level begins with a screen displaying the level number followed by a countdown for 3 seconds. This gives the player time to get ready for the upcoming level.
Each level has 3 header informations - time remaining, level score and the target score for the current level. The level screen also displays the word being formed in the top center of the screen.
The level window also has buttons to mute/unmute the background music and also pause the game.
The letters are generated from a distribution that ensures a high probability of being able to form a meaningful word.
The distribution was created using a dictionary. For every word in the dictionary and for every position - with position defined to be the letter position when counting from the left, for instance, for the word ‘example’, x is the letter in position 2 - the frequency of each letter for every position for 15 positions (assuming the largest word that can be formed in this game is 15 letter long) is found.
We sample randomly from this distribution to generate letters.
For instance, if 5 letters are asked at a time, we sample 1 letter from the distribution of the first position, one from the second, one from the third and so on, so that there is a good chance of a 5 letter word being possibly formed.
The algorithm to generate this can possibly be improved in the future, but this is what it is for now.
The scoring for this game is similar to the one used in scrabble. Each letter has a score associated with it. The score for each letter is also taken from Scrabble. If the player forms a meaningful word (that is present in our dictionary), we compute the sum of the scores of the individual letter in the word and update the score.
The player gets the rating only if they pass the level by scoring the minimum target score. The rating is done in a simple manner as follows:
- Level score < min(2 * Minimum Target score for the Level, Target Score + 10) - 1 star
- Level score < min(3 * Minimum Target score for the Level, Target Score + 20) - 2 stars
- Level score ≥ min(3 * Minimum Target score for the Level, Target Score + 20) - 3 stars
Look into the Game
