Just what this site needs...

[SDragon]

Ah, ok. So just make the upper bound +1 with randrange, then.

[Captain Obvious]

So, I don't know the programming, but here's some thoughts.
You run around the field grabbing cabbages.
The Cabbages gradually respawn.
Occasionally a tainted cabbage appears and if you grab one you die/get stunned.
The tainted cabbages stay as obstacles.
The fiend of the ninth cabbage follow you and you have to avoid him.
The fiend can't move through healthy cabbages and so can only follow your trail.
There are more and more turtles in higher levels.
They initially start trapped by the cabbage but if there are empty spaces adjacent, they move randomly around as obstacles.
The fiend can't move through turtles either.

[Superfluous Crow]

How would you control more than one turtle? Or did you mean Cabbage-fiends? Also, if it just follows your tracks why would it ever catch up with you? Unless it's faster in which case how do you avoid it?

[sparkletwist]

You might want to look into Pygame. It has a lot of features for game development. I've never used it, but I know people who have, and they seem to like it. Because it's optimized for game development it might actually even be easier than trying to shoehorn things into Python's normal capabilities.

As for movement, I'm not sure why you're using such a strange directional map. Is there some programming trick that makes it efficient to do it that way? I'd just do something where you picked a direction and decided it was 0, and then they simply increased clockwise or counterclockwise.

That said, the game might be simpler and more interesting if you just disallowed diagonal movement. You wouldn't have to worry about some weird collision situations that way (moving between two solid objects) and it would make the fiend's pathfinding a bit easier.

[SDragon]

Any two opposing directions add up to 9. That way, to prevent the Fiend from jumping back and forth between two cells, I just have to say if lastmove + currentmove =! 9. I don't have to work out every possible combination of opposing moves.

I suppose I could eliminate diagonal movement, but I'm not sure why I would have to. with this pattern, by the way, elliminating diagonals would look like:

Code Select Expand

X1X
2F3
X4X

while lastmove + currentmove =! 5:
    currentmove = random.randrange(1, 5)

Pygame might be good, yes, but I'm not convinced yet that it's necessary. I haven't really learned much about it yet (I'm still learning about classes), but when I get to that, I'll try to see what this can do with it.

[sparkletwist]

I suppose I could eliminate diagonal movement, but I'm not sure why I would have to.

There's no reason you'd "have" to, but there are a few reasons why you might want to:
- It simplifies your control scheme
- It makes the fiend's pathfinding easier
- It completely avoids the problem that a diagonal move actually covers more ground
- It prevents some weird collision situations with moving between two blocking objects

I guess I'm a bit biased, personally, too, because a lack of diagonal movement is how I would do it. ;)

[SDragon]

We'll see. This is for the guild, so maybe if other people give input, we can come to a decision.

[SDragon]

Looked a bit into pygame, and it looks usable. If that's how I'm doing it, I think it should be tile-based graphics; I'm thinking a 500x500 screen with 25x25 tiles, which would give a 20x20 playing field. Thoughts?