Connect Four ♦️

Connect Four is a game I enjoyed playing with my friends, now it is available to play right in your terminal.

v1.0.0 Gameplay footage

Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/AncientNimbus/rb-connect-four.git
cd rb-connect-four

# Install dependencies
bundle install

# Run the game
bundle exec ruby main.rb

# Display help
--help

# Quit the program
--ttfn

# Launch Connect four
--play connect4

How to play

1. Select a game mode
   1. Mode [1]: Player vs Player
   2. Mode [2]: Player vs Computer (Coming soon!)
2. The game will randomly decide who goes first
3. Player will each take turn to drop a coloured disc into a column
4. To drop the coloured disc, enter a column number between 1 to 7
5. Try to connect four of your discs in a row up and down (vertical), side to side (horizontal), or diagonally
6. The first player to get four of their coloured discs in a row wins! If the whole grid fills up and no one has four in a row, the game is a tie.

Technical Specifications

Core Objectives

• Written with Ruby
• TDD approach
• OOP software architecture

Additional Objectives

• UX design for terminal game
• Localisation ready

Implementation highlights

• Robust input handling (Butterfingers-proof)
• Mathematical Grid system
• Precomputed Lookup Table
• Win condition detection via Set
• Localisation ready via YAML configuration file
• Colourful game interface with terminal interface

Performance Optimisation

• All possible winning combinations are calculated once at startup
• Validation order: Check recent moves first for faster win detection
• Single formula that handles 6 movement directions

Error handling

• User input is validate against Regex pattern
• Warning is displayed when user attampted to add disc to a full row

Screenshot

Gems used

• RSpec
• Rubocop
• Colorize
• Yard