Csdle

I decided to expand a previous project I made, Rdle, which was a plain wordle clone.

Recently however, I have been getting very into Wordle varients, such as Quordle, Octordle, Jewdle, and others. I was inspired to create my own variant, where all the solutions would be Computer Science words.

Like the real game, there is a seperate list of acceptable words and solution words, where you can guess from any acceptable but all the solution words will be related to CS in some way

How to play Csdle

The rules for Csdle are the same as Wordle, except all the solutions will be related to computer science

The rules for Wordle are as follows:

• You must guess a 5 letter word the program has chosen
• You have 6 guesses.
• If a letter is in a solution and the guess you made, the letter will be highlighted yellow
• If a letter is in a solution and the guess you made, in the order you guessed it, the letter will be highlighted green

What I learned

While running my wordle clone for this variant, I discovered a bug within it. It would output a yellow letter and a green when a user inputted a word with a duplicate a letter and one was at the correct index and the solution only had one of these letters.

Put simply, it reached an edge case where it returned a yellow letter where a gray one should have been.

I mulled over how to fix this issue and tried implementing various different data structures to no avail. I used linked lists, vectors, structs, arrays and all sorts of other methods unsuccessfully. I also switched from handling all letters together to seperate functions for each implementation case (green, gray, yellow).

Eventually, I was able to use HashMaps to track the frequency of a letter in the solution, and compare it to the used letters.

I also learned how to use sorts on a struct, as when I switched to a custom struct vector rather than a one-by-one approach, my output was out of order. I added an index element to the struct and learned how to implement my own 'sort by key' Rust method

I look forward to using this knowledge of data structures, implementations, and more in my future projects!