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Advanced Lingo For Games
by Gary Rosenzweig

Chapter 15 Section 6

Once again, the most striking variation between games is not in the graphics, but in the phrases used. However, the interesting thing about Hangman games is that they don't have to have a hangman in them at all (see "Hangman Without the Hangman" later in this chapter).

Accepting Keyboard Input

One minor modification to the game is that you may want to accept keyboard input in addition to allowing the player to click on letters on the screen. This can easily be done by taking the key pressed from an on keyUp handler in the frame behavior, and passing it right in to "on tryLetter".

Phrase Themes

Hangman games are unusual in that long phrases are usually easier to solve than shorter ones. This is because there is less likely of a chance that the player would pick a wrong letter. As a matter of fact, it is easy for you to have phrases that are impossible not to solve. For instance, if the player can choose seven wrong letters before losing, and the phrase uses 20 different letters, it will be impossible to lose. This is because if 20 of the letters are used, only 6 are not used, so the maximum number of wrong guesses that the player can have is 6, but it will take 7 wrong guesses to lose.

Although longer phrases make it harder to lose, they can also be more obscure to the player. So, sometimes a long phrase can be hard, even if it does include many letters.

In fact, many Hangman games are played with a single word rather than a phrase. Sometimes these words have a theme, and sometimes they do not. Here is a list of suggestions for themes for lists of words or short phrases.

Hangman Without the Hangman

Try replacing the hangman with something else. Take the eight bitmaps and draw a bomb counting down from seven to zero. Now, you have the same exact game, with the same exact code, but it appears totally different to the player.

You can suggest a theme to your game this way. If you like, you can get totally away from the morbid theme of traditional Hangman, and use something a little lighter. However, you want to stick with the idea that "something bad" will happen if the graphic sequence reached its end. Here are some suggestions.

You can also use a film loop instead of a static graphic for each stage of the hanging. This way, you can see the poor guy struggle.