Python Project No.2: Text-based Adventure Game

python

2020

Author

Aster Hu

Published

June 22, 2020

Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, 1980

This idea of text-based game immediately brought to my attention because I’m a fan of Zork. For those of you don’t know, Zork it’s one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games, and it’s text-based.

This is only the beginning of the game. The source code is at the bottom.

Input/Output

I’m using Python3 so no need to struggle with input() and raw_input() as the latter doesn’t exist in Python3 anymore.

For output, print() is good enough to catch everything I need.

print("\nYou are in front of an old white house.")
response = input("Would you like to step in?(yes/no)\n")

If Statements

Ah, the magic statement in every language.

Note that Python’s If result cannot be empty. If there’s no action, put pass in the statement instead.

if response == "yes":
    print("\nThere's a wooden door in front of you. It's locked from inside.")
elif response == "no":
    print("\nGoodbye.")
    quit()
else:
    pass

Loops

I used while loops here. The logic is that the loop will continue until the input matches certain conditions.

yes_no = ["yes", "no"]

while response not in yes_no:
    response = input("\nYou are in front of an old white house. Would you like to step in?(yes/no)\n")
    if response == "yes":
        print("\nThere's a wooden door in front of you. It's locked from inside.")
    elif response == "no":
        print("\nGoodbye.")
        quit()
    else:
        print("\nI didn't understand that.\n")

Dedent

Print Multiple Lines without Indent

Here comes the little challenge. Enclosed with triple quotes is the way to print multiple lines, however, it will also display indent like below.

You find yourself standing in a kitchen. There’s some food on a table. On the corner, you can see a brass lantern and a knife on the counter. A hallway is in the west of the kitchen.

To avoid the extra indent, use textwrap.dedent to remove unnecessary indent.

from textwrap import dedent

  desc = dedent("""
  You find yourself standing in a kitchen. There's some food on a table.
  In the corner, you can see a brass lantern and a knife on the counter.
  A hallway is in the west of the kitchen.
  """)
  print(desc)

Output: >You find yourself standing in a kitchen. There’s some food on a table. >In the corner, you can see a brass lantern and a knife on the counter. >A hallway is in the west of the kitchen.

Source Code# Setup
from textwrap import dedent
yes_no = ["yes", "no"]
directions = ["west", "east", "south", "north"]

# Start of game
response = ""
while response not in yes_no:
    response = input("\nYou are in front of an old white house. Would you like to step in?(yes/no)\n")
    if response == "yes":
        print("\nThere's a wooden door in front of you. It's locked from inside.")
    elif response == "no":
        print("\nGoodbye.")
        quit()
    else:
        print("\nI didn't understand that.\n")

#Old House
response = ""
while response not in directions:
    response = input("What direction do you want to move? (west/east/north/south)\n")
    if response == "west":
        print("\nYou're in the west of house. You see a window but it's locked.")
        response = ""
    elif response == "east":
        print("\nYou're in the east of house. There's an open, small window.")
    elif response == "south":
        print("\nYou're already in the south of house. You can see a locked door in front of you.")
        response = ""
    elif response == "north":
        print("\nYou're now in the north of house. There's nothing in here.")
        response = ""
    elif response == "exit":
        print("\nYou leave the house. Goodbye,")
        quit()
    else:
        print("\nI didn't understand that.\n")

#Kitchen
response = ""
while response not in yes_no:
    response = input("Do you want to open the window? (yes/no) \n")
    if response == "yes":
        desc = dedent("""
        You find yourself standing in a kitchen. There's some food on a table.
        On the corner, you can see a brass lantern and a knife on the counter.
        A hallway is in the west of the kitchen.
        """)
        print(desc)
    elif response == "no":
        print("\nGoodbye.")
        quit()