Challenge Project: Find Your Hat

Overview

This project is slightly different than others you have encountered thus far on Codecademy. Instead of a step-by-step tutorial, this project contains a series of open-ended requirements which describe the project you’ll be building. There are many possible ways to correctly fulfill all of these requirements, and you should expect to use the internet, Codecademy, and other resources when you encounter a problem that you cannot easily solve.

Project Goals

In this project, you’ll be building an interactive terminal game. The scenario is that the player has lost their hat in a field full of holes, and they must navigate back to it without falling down one of the holes or stepping outside of the field.

Setup Instructions

If you choose to do this project on your computer instead of Codecademy, you can download what you’ll need by clicking the “Download” button below. You’ll need to open and work in main.js in a text editor. To edit main.js, use your text editor of choice. If you need a recommendation or help to install an editor, we recommend looking into our article about setting up a text editor for web development (Follow along until you get to the section: “Practice: Let’s Make a Project”). To run main.js on your computer, you will need to install Node.js. If you need help installing Node.js, read our article on installing Node.

Future Work

If you’d like to extend your project past our requirements, here are a few ideas:

• Add a .generateField() method to your Field class. This doesn’t need to be tied to a particular instance, so make it a static method of the class itself.

  This method should at least take arguments for height and width of the field, and it should return a randomized two-dimensional array representing the field with a hat and one or more holes. In our solution, we added a third percentage argument used to determine what percent of the field should be covered in holes.

• Have the character start on a random location that’s not the upper-left corner.

• Create a “hard mode” where one or more holes are added after certain turns.

• Improve your game’s graphics and interactivity in the terminal. There are many helpful packages to assist with this, and you can really get creative with how you approach terminal games.

• Create a field validator to ensure that the field generated by Field.generateField() can actually be solved. This might be pretty difficult! You’ll essentially be creating a version of a maze solver.