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

Final Design

As with all previous Friday projects, we need to create a final design that we can follow. This week is a little different, as we need to design our classes first as well. This will help us figure out what attributes and methods our classes need to have before we even begin programming. Sticking to this blueprint will improve the programming process. First, let’s think about what classes we need. In Blackjack, you have specific game rules, game actions, and the deck itself. Then we also need to consider that there is a player and a dealer playing the game. It seems that we need to create two classes, one for the game itself and one for the two players. You could argue that you need a separate class for the dealer and player; however, we are keeping this game design a bit simpler. Let’s think about what the Game class needs first:

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  Game Attributes
  

deck – holds all 52 cards to be used within the game suites – used to create deck, tuple of all four suits values – used to create deck, tuple of all card values

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  Game Methods
  

makeDeck – creates new 52-card deck when called pullCard – pops random card from deck and returns it
The Game class is mainly going to keep track of the deck that we’re playing with. We could certainly put all methods associated with the game inside of this class as well; however, I’d like to keep the classes simple for you to understand. If you’d like to refactor the game afterward, feel free to do so. Methods like checkWinner, checkBust, handleTurn, etc., could all be part of the Game class. For this lesson, we’re not going to worry about adding these methods to Game. Knowing what the Game class is going to handle is going to help us understand what our Player class needs. Let’s go ahead and plan out the attributes and methods for this class now:

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  Player Attributes hand – stores cards within player’s hand
  

name – string variable that stores name of the player or dealer

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  Player Methods
  

calcHand – returns the calculated total of points in hand showHand – prints out player’s hand in a nicely formatted statement addCard – takes in a card and adds it to the player’s hand
As we can see, the Player class will be keeping track of each player’s hand and any methods associated with altering the hand. Generally, you always want to put methods that alter an attribute within the same class that the attribute is stored. Now that we have a good idea of the attributes and methods needed for each class, we’ll follow this guideline to program the game.