Python Projects for Beginners a ten-Week Bootcamp Approach to Python Programming

Adding Imports

We’ll be writing this program in one cell, and it will be around 50 lines long. The first step is to import a few additional functions that we need:

1| # import additional functions
2| from random import choice
3| from IPython.display import clear_output

The second line is importing a function called “choice” which will select a random item from a list. We’ll use this to randomize the word chosen. The third line is importing a Jupyter Notebook specific function which clears the output. When using a loop, if we don’t clear output, it will continue to output on top of each other.

Declaring Game Variables

The next step is to understand what variables we need to run the game and declare them. If you think about Hangman and what we need to keep track of, we need to track the user’s lives, the word they are trying to guess, a list of words to choose from, and whether the game is over:

5| # declare game variables
6| words = [ "tree", "basket", "chair", "paper", "python" ]
7| word = choice(words) # randomly chooses a word from words list
8| guessed, lives, game_over = [ ], 7, False # multi variable assignment

Line seven declares a variable called word, which will select a random item from our words list. The eighth line is where we declare three variables together; guessed will be given the value of an empty list, lives will be set to 7, and game_over will be declared to False.
Note As we code along, feel free to write print statements to check the value of each variable. It helps to see what we’re declaring.

Generating the Hidden Word

During the game, we want the user to be able to see how many letters are within the word. To do this, we can create a list of strings, where each string is an underscore. The number of items in the list will be set to the same length of the word chosen:

10| # create a list of underscores to the length of the word
11| guesses = [ "_ " ] * len(word)

On line 11 we’re declaring a variable called guesses, which is set to a list of underscores. We get the proper length by multiplying the list by the length of the word.