Python Assignment

Question

The game you will construct here will require user input to appease or defeat the characters above, each of which has a different requirement. To receive full credit for this assignment, your program must:

1. Include proper commentary
2. Begin by welcoming the user to the program however you see fit and giving a premise/general overview
3. Your program should require the user to press “enter” (or really enter ANYTHING) to start the game, at which point you should begin the timer
4. Once the game starts, your program should run for ten “rounds”. In each round:
5. Your program should RANDOMLY pick one of the first three characters from the list that will represent the user’s “task” that round (see extra credit for what to do with the fourth character)
6. Display the character that was chosen on the screen
7. Display some fun message that, among other things, tells the user what they have to do to progress past the character (see below)
8. Accept the user’s input, and:
9. If the correct input was entered, the program should move on to the next round
10. If incorrect input was entered, the program should immediately terminate with a message telling the user they lost
11. Each character has a different requirement:
12. The first character above, Gollum, requires the user to enter any vowel, regardless of capitalization. However, the user may NOT use the same vowel to move past successive Gollum characters, even if they don’t come one immediately after another. So, for example, if the first character generated is Gollum, and he is defeated with A, then the next time Gollum appears, the only options are E, I, O, and U.
13. The second character, Gandalf, requires the user to enter the phrase YOU SHALL NOT PASS. Capitalization should NOT matter—i.e., everything like you shall not pass, YOU SHALL NOT PASS, and yoU sHALl NoT paSS should work.
14. The third character, Smaug, requires payment to be defeated. He can be paid with American bill denominations, but must be paid exactly what he asks for. Your program should:
15. Randomly generate an int from 1 to 1000, inclusive. When Smaug appears, he should tell the user that this number is required as payment.
16. In order, ask the user how many of each bill they would like to give to Smaug. Bills include $100, $50, $20, $10, $5, and $1.
17. If, after the last bill amount request, the value of all sent bills exactly-equals the requested amount, Smaug allows the user to pass
18. If the user successfully completes ten rounds, the program should output a message telling them they have won, and tell the user the amount of time it took to complete the game.

Answer 1

I am NOT a Python programmer so I can't give you detailed advice on how to specifically implement a solution, but I can help you understand what the program is supposed to do.

Welcome message - this is a terminal application so look up how to write a text message, typically something along the lines of "print"

Press any key - "Enter" is fairly easy as most programming languages end input on the newline character, but pressing any key will require you look up keybindings as you will need to capture ANY event from the keyboard so look for something like "on key press".

Smaug should be fairly easy math. You know the order the bills are offered so take your random amount and subtract the value entered by the user (you will likely have to parse the string to an integer) multiplied by the value of the bill. If the amount owed to Smaug equals zero after subtracting the $1 bills you win.

Use a for loop to implement the 10 rounds. I would use an enumeration data structure to create named constants for GANDALF, SMAUG, and GOLEM and then generate a random number from 1 to 3 (Python is 1 indexed) and then use a switch statement to determine which boss you are fighting that round. Loops and switch statements don't always get along nicely so I would just increment your loop control variable past the end to guarantee things end.

For Gollum, I would definitely use a list data structure since you are editing it randomly. Create a list of vowels in whatever case you want, iterate over the list comparing the user input to each member in the list using a case insensitive compare (or use something like toLower or toUpper to convert it to your preferred case), and remove the list entry on a match or trigger the end condition without a match.

Gandalf is solved similarly to Gollum, except you just need to use a string trim method (to remove extra spaces) followed by a case insensitive compare.

The timing function can be accomplished by getting the time when you first start the program and getting the time at the end and subtracting. Use a Date method to print it in a human readable form.