Inspiration
Our inspiration was our love of crosswords and lack of money - the New York Times Crossword subscription costs around $8/month, and we found a github repo with (almost) all of the puzzles from 1976 until 2018! We drew some inspiration from the NYT Crossword app, but put our own twist on it.
(https://github.com/doshea/nyt_crosswords)
What it does
Takes the daily NYT crossword puzzles since 1976 and selects a random one to generate the pattern - and then you can have a good time filling out the crossword and checking your work!
How we built it
Used python and tkinter to take in the .json files and then parse them to create the GUI, validation of input (making everything uppercase and only accepting one character per square), and answer checking.
Challenges we ran into
We struggled to properly read in and validate the user inputs, and had to deal with a bug with accessing each text Entry in our giant list of text Entries.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Figuring out tkinter!! The documentation is outdated, and some sections of tkinter don't interface correctly with Python 3, so some workarounds were needed. We're super proud of making it look just like a real crossword!
What we learned
We learned a ton doing this project, from parsing .json files, to tkinter, to GUIs in general! And as always, learning how to debug it all.
What's next for Crossy Word
Add functionality to generate crossword puzzles based on past NYT crosswords - ML style! We have all the data at our fingertips, we'd just need a lot more time and a lot more knowledge to make it happen.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.