NBA Hoops Hunch Game

Video Demo: https://youtu.be/U6AUmP2Unyw

Intro

Welcome to the NBA Hoops Hunch game! Test your NBA knowledge by filling in a grid with players who have played on both teams shown. Use your skills and insights to find matching players. One goal: complete the grid!

Inspired by: https://www.hoopgrids.com/

Table of Contents

• Description
• Dependencies
• How to Play
• Files and functions

Description

This Python script implements the "NBA Hoops Hunch" game. The game comes with a 3x3 grid with NBA teams in the row and column headers. Your goal is to guess players who have played for both teams specified by their numeric positions in the grid.

The game uses the NBA API to fetch information about teams and players. There are interactive features, such as terminal-based play and a nice colorful formatting.

Dependencies

• nba_api
• numpy
• os
• pandas
• pyfiglet
• random
• re
• sys
• tabulate
• termcolor
• time
• typing

The required modules which not comes with Python itself can be installed using the following command:

pip install nba_api numpy pandas pyfiglet tabulate termcolor

How to play

To play the game, follow these steps:

1. Run the script
2. Follow the instructions displayed in the terminal
3. Guess players by typing their name and the corresponding number from the grid, as shown in the instructions
4. To quit, press CTRL+C or CTRL+D

Files and functions

project.py

This is the main file, composed of the following elements:

imports

• The first part of the code consists of importing various libraries and modules needed for the program's functionality. It includes libraries for working with NBA data, numerical computations, operating system interactions, data manipulation, text formatting and more. The typing module is also imported to support type hinting.

global variables

• nba_teams dictionary containing information from the 30 NBA franchises
• scores_emoji dictionary that translates numbers into emoji

class Game

• The Game class represents the core logic of the NBA Hoops Hunch game. This class is responsible for managing game state information. The class includes methods and properties that allow interaction with the game, as per below:

  • Attributes

    • row_teams list of team names of grid rows
    • col_teams list of team names of grid columns
    • grid the game grid represented as a Pandas DataFrame
    • guessed players number of players who have been guessed so far

  • Methods

    • __init__ the constructor of the class that initializes the above attributes
    • __str__ returns a printable representation of the Game object, printing a welcome banner and the grid
    • banner returns a string representing the welcome banner and instructions for the game
    • is_finished checks if the game is finished by checking if all players have been guessed
    • validate_response checks whether the response given by the user is correct according to the rules of the game
    • player_is_guessed checks whether a player has been guessed based on the location and name provided by the user
    • update_grid updates the grid with the name of the guessed player based on the location and name provided by the user

  • Properties

    • grid property that returns the DataFrame object representing the game grid
    • guessed_player property that returns the number of guessed players

main

• This function is used as the primary entry point for program execution when the file is run as a script. The main contains all the function calls that handle the progress of the game and the implementation logic for it.

get_teams_played

• This function receives as input the name of an NBA player and returns a list of abbreviations of the teams on which that player played during his career.

• get_teams_played performs an online search of the "stats.nba.com" database, using the players module included in the imported API. If the name provided does not match a valid player, the exception is handled and an error message is printed. In this case, the function returns an empty list, as well as in the case where a player also played for teams prior to the founding of the NBA.

create_grid

• This function aims to create and initialize a game grid using a Pandas DataFrame object. The grid represents three NBA teams organized into rows and columns.

• create_grid takes as input two lists: row (list of team names for rows) and col (list of team names for columns) and associates each pair of the elements in these lists with an identifying number. The latter will be used by the user to indicate which cell of the table he/she intends to complete, providing precise and unambiguous input.

get_pos_and_name

• This function handles the process of extracting the grid position and player name from a user-provided response. The function relies on regular expressions to parse the response by extracting the necessary information.

• get_pos_and_name receives as input a string representing the response provided by the user. Two scenarios can occur at this point:

  • if the user's response matches the pattern defined in the regular expression, the function will return a tuple containing two elements: pos (the position in the grid) and name (the player's name)
  • if there is no match in the regular expression, the function will return None

test_project.py

• This file was created specifically for use with the pytest testing library, with the goal of automating and simplifying the process of testing the functions defined in the project.py file.

requirements.txt

• This file reports the command lines that must be run from the terminal in order to install, via pip, the modules necessary for NBA Hoops Hunch to work.