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

Creating the Game Loop

Every game has a main loop no matter the size of the program. Our main loop will perform the logic that we defined in our Final Design section. Rather than writing it all out at once, let’s take small steps. The first step is to be able to accept user input and stop playing the game:

13| # create main game loop 14| while not game_over:
15| ans = input("Type quit or guess a letter: ").lower( ) 17| if ans == "quit":
18| print("Thanks for playing.")
19| game_over = True

Go ahead and run the cell. If you type “quit”, the program should stop as we are looping until game_over is set to True, which only occurs when we input “quit”.
Note Always make sure the cell is done running before moving on.

Outputting Game Information

The next step is to start outputting information to the user. Let’s output their lives and the word that they’re trying to guess in a nicely formatted statement:

14| while not game_over: ◻◻◻
15| # output game information
16| hidden_word = "".join(guesses)
17| print( "Word to guess: { }".format(hidden_word) )
18| print( "Lives: { }".format(lives) )
20| ans = input( ◻◻◻

Go ahead and run the cell. Depending on the word chosen, you’ll get a different output. If the word chosen was four letters, we’ll get an output of “Word to guess: _ _ _ _” and “Lives: 7”. The format is nothing new, but what about line 16? The reason we’re able to create a string of underscores to output in line 17 is because of the join method. It states that we want to join all the items within the guesses list together with no spaces in between. For example:
>>> chars = ['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']
>>> print('-'.join(chars))
The preceding two lines would output “h-e-l-l-o”. This is a simple way to display our list as a string.