4 Pics 1 Word

The Brief

A group project, population one.

4 Pics 1 Word is a desktop clone of the mobile word puzzle, built in Python with Tkinter for a first-year module exam. Four images share one word; the player spells it from a rack of jumbled letters. It was supposed to be a group project. I ended up building it alone, as a first year still inexperienced with programming and with Python itself.

The Problem

I did not know game loops existed.

Partway in, the build stopped dead. A game needs to reset itself after every guess, new picture, new answer, new letter rack, same window, and I hit a mental block on how that was supposed to happen, because the concept of a game loop was something I had never been taught. I did not even have the vocabulary to search for it.

The way out was naive logic that I reasoned from scratch: if I cannot update the board, I can destroy it and build a new one. Every widget of the finished level gets torn down, and the next level is constructed in its place:

# Most Important Part of Code, It updates the state of the game.
def updateGameState(self):
    # Delete Previous Game State
    self.bg1.destroy()
    self.frameTwo.destroy()
    for widget in self.frameTwoButtons.grid_slaves():
        widget.destroy()
    for box in self.boxContainer:
        box.destroy()
    ...
    # Create New Game State and Update State

That comment is verbatim from the source, and it was accurate. Brute force by any measure, a real game engine would update state, not demolish the interface, but every feature in the game hangs off that one method, and it worked.

The Outcome

Fifty levels, four rewrites, one file.

The finished game runs 50 levels from a bank of picture puzzles, each rack padded to 12 buttons with random letters and shuffled. A coin economy sits on top: 100 coins to start, 10 earned per solved level, 2 spent on a hint that reveals and locks the next correct letter, 10 to skip a puzzle into a queue it will return from later. Closing the window saves level, coins, and completed puzzles to a text file, and the game resumes from it on launch.

All of it lives in one 426-line Tkinter class. The original filename in the repo tells the rest of the story: MP2-GeronaJulianPeterv4.py. There were three versions before the one that worked.