Well it almost killed me, but here’s the first fully playable version of my remake of the classic game Mastermind by Pressman Toy.
It all started about a year and a half ago, the summer after I graduated college. I was decompressing after 16 years of straight schooling, but knew I needed a job soon. I decided to put my free time to good use and learn a new skill. Macromedia Flash seemed like a good thing to learn because it’s not just a programming language. It makes creating interactive programs and animations easy.
So I downloaded the demo version of flash and started tinkering. I did some basic animations but I needed a programming project to learn ActionScript. I learn by doing, so I decided on something relatively open ended that I could keep working on. I remembered when I was about 6, my dad had taught himself Basic on our Commodore 64 by making a version of a game called Mastermind. It worked really well and the 16-color sprites were true to the game.
The goal of Mastermind is to deduce a hidden 5-color sequence by trial and error. With each guess you are told how many colors you guessed right, and how many of those are in the right and wrong spots. You test your hypotheses of each color by comparing the results of your guesses. What I like about the game is it’s all about the thinking. The interface should be as transparent as possible so your mental faculties can concentrate on deducing the secret code. That was my goal.
There’s still a lot I want to do with it. I plan on adding an actual “Mastermind” character, an evil professor sort, who taunts you based on the accuracy of your guesses. I want to fix the perspective so it looks more three-dimensional. I also want to implement difficulty levels so beginners can play with fewer pieces and choose whether colors in the secret code repeat or not. Maybe adding a “Give Up” button would work too.
You can play Mastermind online, or you can download Mastermind for offline enjoyment.
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