Design

This game roughly follows the Model-View-Controller(MVC) pattern. In the latest overhaul, these roles have been explicitly named: hangman.model, hangman.view, hangman.controller.

Traditionally in MVC the controller is the focal point. It tells the view what information to collect from the user and what to show. It uses that information to communicate with the model–also, the data persistence later–and determine the next step. This Hangman MVC adheres to these principals

Model

The model is very simply the hangman game instance–hangman.model.Hangman. It’s a class. Every class should have “state” and the methods of that class should manage that state. In this case, the “state” is the current “state of the game”. The public API are for managing that state.

The entirety of the game logic is contained in hangman.model.Hangman. You could technically play the game in the python console by instantiating the class, submitting guesses with the method hangman.model.Hangman.guess() and printing the game state.

For example:

>>> from hangman.model import Hangman
>>> game = Hangman(answer='hangman')
>>> game.guess('a')
hangman(status='_A___A_', misses=[], remaining_turns=10)

>>> game.guess('n').guess('z').guess('e')
hangman(status='_AN__AN', misses=['E', 'Z'], remaining_turns=8)

>>> game.status
'_AN__AN'

>>> game.misses
['E', 'Z']

>>> game.remaining_turns
8

View

hangman.view is a collection of stateless functions that represent the presentation layer. When called these functions handles printing the art to the console, and collecting input from the user.

Controller

In this program, the controller is actually the “game_loop”–hangman.controller.game_loop(). I still think of it as a controller because the role it plays–communicating I/O from the view with the model-persistence layer.

The controller tells the view later what to print and what data to collect. It uses that information update the state of the game (model) and handle game events.