My Little Project: Guess the League of Legends Champions
So, I got this idea the other day. You know how sometimes you just wanna build something, anything, just to keep your hands busy? That was me. I play a fair bit of League of Legends, maybe too much, haha. And I thought, wouldn’t it be kind of fun to make a little game where you guess the champion?
First thing was getting the list of champions. Seemed easy enough. I figured I’d just find a list online somewhere and copy-paste it into a text file. Took a bit longer than I thought, actually, formatting it and making sure I didn’t miss any or spell ’em wrong. You know how it is, fiddly work.
Then came the coding part. I decided to just use some basic stuff I know, nothing fancy. My first attempt was super simple: pick a random name from the list, ask the user for input, check if it matches. Easy, right? Well, kinda. Got the basic loop working after a bit of head-scratching. It would pick a champ, I’d type a guess, and it would tell me if I was right or wrong. Pretty barebones.
But just guessing felt a bit bland. And hard, honestly. There are so many champions now. So, I thought about adding hints. What kind of hints?
- Maybe the champion’s role? Like ‘Mage’ or ‘Tank’.
- Or maybe the first letter?
- Or maybe even show the number of letters in the name?
I went with showing the number of letters first, seemed simplest to implement. Just get the length of the champion’s name string. Later, I added the first letter as another hint if you got stuck. Getting the role data seemed like more work than I wanted to do for this little thing, so I skipped that.
It was all running in a boring console window. Looked pretty plain. So, I thought, why not try and make it look a tiny bit better? I messed around with some basic HTML and Javascript. Just enough to have an input box, a button to submit the guess, and a place to show the hints and feedback. Nothing professional, mind you, just enough to make it feel slightly more like a ‘game’. Fought with the layout for a while, as always.
Testing was mostly just me playing it. Found a few bugs where the comparison wasn’t working right (case sensitivity, classic mistake) or the random pick wasn’t random enough. Fixed those up. Then I let a buddy try it. He found a couple more edge cases I hadn’t thought of, like what happens if you enter nothing and press guess. Good catch.
So yeah, that’s the story. It’s not going to win any awards, it’s just a simple guessing game. But I took it from an idea to something that actually works. It was a fun little exercise, reminded me that sometimes just building a small thing you thought of can be pretty satisfying. Kept me busy for a weekend, anyway.
