My Little NFL Logo Guesser Project
Okay, so I decided to throw together a little project recently, just for kicks. I’m a big NFL fan, and I thought, why not make a simple game to guess the team logos? Seemed like a fun way to practice some basic stuff I hadn’t touched in a while.
First things first, I needed the logos. I spent a bit of time just gathering them up. Went online and searched for each NFL team’s logo. Tried to find reasonably good quality images, clear ones, you know? Saved them all into a folder on my computer. That part was pretty straightforward, just a bit tedious clicking and saving.
Next, I set up the basic structure. I didn’t want anything complicated, so I just used plain old HTML to create the page. Put in a spot where the logo would show up, an input box for the guess, and a button to submit the guess. Kept it super simple.
Then I added a little bit of CSS. Honestly, mostly just to center things on the page and make the logo not take up the entire screen. Didn’t go wild with styling, just enough so it wasn’t completely ugly.
Making It Work
The main part was getting the guessing logic running. This is where I used JavaScript. Here’s kinda how I approached it:
- Storing the Data: I needed a way to link the logo images to the actual team names. I created a simple list or array in my JavaScript code. Each item basically held the path to the logo image file and the correct team name.
- Showing a Random Logo: I wrote a small function to pick a random team from my list and display its logo on the page when the page loads, or when you get one right.
- Checking the Guess: When the user types something into the input box and hits the button (or Enter key), another JavaScript function grabs the typed text. It compares this text to the correct team name stored for the currently displayed logo. I had to make sure the comparison ignored upper/lower case, ’cause people type differently.
- Feedback: If the guess was right, maybe show a quick “Correct!” message. If wrong, show “Nope, try again” or something similar. I also decided it would be helpful to show the correct answer if the guess was wrong.
Adding a Few Extras
Once the basic guessing worked, I thought about adding a couple more things to make it slightly better.
Keeping Score: Added a simple counter. Every time you guess correctly, the score goes up by one. Displayed the score somewhere on the page so you can see how you’re doing.
Next Logo Automatically: Instead of needing to click another button for the next logo after a correct guess, I made it automatically load the next random logo after a short delay. Feels smoother that way.
Some Stumbling Blocks
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, naturally. Ran into a couple of small things.
Getting all the logos to display at a consistent size took a bit of fiddling with the CSS. Some logos are wide, some are tall, so making them look okay together needed some tweaking.
Also, team names. What counts as correct? Like, should “Niners” work for the “San Francisco 49ers”? Or “Pats” for “New England Patriots”? For this simple version, I decided to stick to requiring the official-ish full name (like “49ers” or “Patriots”). Makes the checking logic way simpler for a quick project like this.
Wrapping It Up
So yeah, that was pretty much it. Didn’t take ages, maybe a few hours spread out. Ended up with a functional little NFL logo guesser game. It’s nothing fancy, won’t win any awards, but it does what I wanted it to do. It was a good refresher on manipulating page elements with JavaScript and handling basic user input. Sometimes it’s just satisfying to build something small and see it work from start to finish, you know?
