Dr Kirill Sidorov Cardiff University

School of Computer Science and Informatics

CM1101 Computational Thinking

This set of exercises will guide you towards building your own text-based adventure game, step
by step. Initially, we will concentrate only on the bare essentials: movement of the protagonist
around the world, and we will continue to build up the game in the subsequent labs. If you do
not manage to finish all the exercises in the lab, please continue doing them at the next lab or at
home. Remember, the lab tutors are here to help. If you get stuck — do not be shy, raise your
hand and ask for advice.

Good luck!

1 Download game1_template.zip from Learning Central and unzip it into a folder on your H: drive.
This template provides a basic structure for the game. The map of the game and the descriptions
of all rooms are found in map.py file, and the main code for the game is in game.py. These are
just templates which you need to fill in with your code. Each function is commented and some
doctest tests are provided. Feel free to examine the structure of the game code.

2 Edit map.py, in which the rooms are defined as dictionaries, and complete the "exits" field for
each room according to this map:

Figure 1: Map of the game.

The "exits" field is itself a dictionary, where the keys are the names of the exits (e.g. "south")
and values are identifiers of the rooms to which these exits lead (e.g. "MJ and Simon"). See the
rooms dictionary at the bottom of map.py for the list of room identifiers (this dictionary maps
room identifiers to rooms themselves). One of the exits (leading "south" from "Reception" to
"MJ and Simon") has been defined for you. Complete the rest.

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 3 Examine the main() function which contains the main game loop. The way it works is as follows:
• It prints the name and description of the current room (which at start is initialised to
"Reception").
• It displays a menu of available exits and prompts the player where they want to go next.
• The current room is updated to reflect the movement of the player.
This loop repeats forever. Make sure you understand the main game logic here before proceeding.

4 Test your template by running:

python -m doctest -v game.py

You should see a test report which contains mostly failed tests. As you fill in the provided
template with your code, more and more tests will pass and eventually, towards the end of the
lab, all tests should pass. If you want to see the output only for the tests that failed, use:

python -m doctest game.py

Proceed by completing all the functions in the provided template. Make sure to run tests each
time to verify the correctness of your code.

5 Complete the display_room function, for which the description and some tests have been provided
in the comments. Make sure to read these carefully. Run the tests again to make sure that your
implementation is correct.

6 Complete the function print_menu_line which simply prints a line in a menu of exits, given the
name of the exit and where it leads to. Again, read the documentation for this function and test
examples carefully, and remember to run the tests.

7 Complete the function print_menu which, given a list of available exits, prints all of them (use
the previously completed print_menu_line function to print information about each exit). You
also need to define a helper function exit_leads_to which returns the name of the room to
which a particular exit leads. Again, run tests.

8 Complete the function menu which displays a list of available exits and prompts the player where
they want to go next. For now, assume that the player always enters a valid exit (i.e. no
normalisation of input and checking for correctness is required).

9 Complete the function move which updates the current room based on the exit the player chose
in the menu function. The game should now be basically playable (if we assume the player always
enters correct commands). Run the tests and try playing your game.

10 To check whether the player has selected a valid exit from the menu, complete the function
is_valid_exit. Now, update your menu function to repeat asking the player until they enter a
valid exit.

11 To make processing of the input more robust, and to allow the player some flexibility, e.g.
South! or sOuTh..., we define the function normalise_input which removes punctuation and
whitespace, and converts the input to lower case. Complete this function, having completed
the helper functions remove_punct and remove_spaces. You may dig into the Python standard
library and get away with easy solutions (for example, .strip() will remove the whitespace
around a string), however it is more instructive to write these functions yourself!

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