Pythons Project for beginners - Post 14: Hangman Game

Let's build a classic Hangman Game. This project is a fantastic way to practice working with strings, lists, loops, and conditional logic to create an interactive game.

First, here is the explanation of how the project is built.

How the "Hangman Game" is Made

1. The Core Idea: The goal is to create a text-based Hangman game. The computer will pick a secret word, and the player has to guess it letter by letter. The player has a limited number of incorrect guesses (lives) before the game is over.

2. Setting up the Game:

   • Word List: We start with a list of words. The program will use the random.choice() function to pick one secret word from this list at the start of each game.

   • Game State Variables: We need several variables to keep track of the game's state: guesses_left (e.g., starts at 6), guessed_letters (an empty list to store the letters the player has already tried), and secret_word.

3. The Main Game Loop: The core of the game is a while loop that continues as long as the player has more than zero guesses left. Inside this loop, all the game actions happen.

4. Displaying the Word: On each turn, we need to show the player their progress. We will display the secret word, but with underscores (_) for the letters they haven't guessed yet. We do this by looping through each letter of the secret_word. If a letter is in our guessed_letters list, we display it; otherwise, we display an underscore.

5. Handling Player Input:

   • We use the input() function to ask the player to guess a letter. We convert their input to lowercase using .lower() to make the check case-insensitive.

   • We add validation to check if the player has already guessed that letter or if they entered something that isn't a single letter.

6. Checking the Guess:

   • If the guesseda letter is in the secret_word, we add it to our guessed_letters list and tell the player they were correct.

   • If the guessed letter is not in the secret_word, we tell them it's wrong and decrease their guesses_left by one. We also add the wrong guess to guessed_letters so they don't lose another life for the same mistake.

7. Winning and Losing Conditions:

   • Winning: After each turn, we need to check if the player has won. The player wins if there are no more underscores in the displayed word. We can check this by building the display string and seeing if _ is still in it. If not, the player has won, and we use break to exit the loop.

   • Losing: The while loop naturally handles the losing condition. If guesses_left reaches zero, the loop's condition becomes false, and it terminates. After the loop, we check if the player won or if the loop just ended. If they didn't win, it means they lost.

8. Putting It All Together: The main function will set up the initial variables, run the main game loop, and then print the final win or lose message, revealing the secret word if they lost.