So Michelle already posted on Google+ about the python workshop that we went to in Raleigh. One of the excercises was creating and modifying a number guessing game. That wasn't quite thrilling enough for Michelle and I, so we upped the vodka-soaked, backalley ante with a Russian Roulette game. After a lot (A LOT) of refactoring, we came up with this code:
import random
"""
An attempted game made by Stacey and Michelle!
"""
chamber = random.randint(0, 5)
trigger_pulls = 6
num_tries = 0
print ("Let's play a game.\nRussian Roulette.\n\nYou have a gun.\nThere is one bullet, and six chambers in the gun.\n\n\nGood luck.")
guess = 0
while guess != chamber and num_tries < trigger_pulls:
guess = raw_input("Do you want to play?\n")
if guess == "y" and chamber == num_tries:
print ("You die! Thanks for playing!")
break
elif guess == "y" and chamber != num_tries:
print ("You're still alive, I see. Try again.")
else:
print ("Lame. Get out.")
break
num_tries = num_tries + 1
Basically the idea is to have the computer select a random number between 1-6 which represents the chamber the bullet is in. Every time the player enters 'y'/pulls the trigger, the program checks to see if you've hit the selected chamber. Once you hit the right (wrong!) chamber, you die (figuratively) and the game ends.
Some of the things we had trouble with in this code and wanted to mention were:
We originally had input instead of raw_input, and everytime the user would enter a 'y' or 'n' about whether or not they wanted to play, we got a syntax error. From what I understood, input tries to interpret the response from the user as a numeric expression, while raw_input treats everything like a string. So raw_input was much better suited for our purpose.
This code was much longer, because we started out testing chamber(the random number selected) against 1, then 2, then 3, all the way to 6. One of the workshop instructors pointed out that we had actually already created a variable that was essentially doing that for us. Comparing chamber to num_tries did the exact same thing and let us really cut down the code. In retrospect, it's a really simple fix, but it didn't occur to me that we could double dip with a variable like that. I guess the lesson is to check to see if something you already did can serve multiple purposes. Recycle, reduce, re-use! Captain Planet!
Lastly, I wanted to mention the break that's in this code several times. When we first wrote this code, it kept running all the way though all the chambers instead of stopping between each turn or when the person died. Not cool! The lovely people at the workshop let us know that if we put break at the end of our condition clauses it would stop the loop without having it run all the way through. There's more about it on the python website. We found it very handy!