Dr Kirill Sidorov Cardiff University

School of Computer Science and Informatics

CM1101 Computational Thinking

This set of exercises will guide you towards improving your adventure game. We will implement
a more advanced parser for the player’s input and also implement the concept of items and
inventory. 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 game2_template.zip from Learning Central and unzip it into a folder on your H:
drive. This template improves upon the previous version of the game. I have made some minor
structural changes (see Appendix for the summary), but otherwise the main logic of the game
remains almost the same.
The file items.py now contains the definitions of items one may encounter in the game (either
carried by the player, or lying around in the rooms). Just like rooms, items are dictionaries, with
fields "id", "name", and "description".
Rooms now have an additional field, items, which is a list of items found in the room. Similarly,
inventory (a global variable in module player.py) is a list of items carried by the player.

2 Update the function normalise_input (it is now in parser.py) so that it returns a list of
words from the player’s input. It should, as before, strip punctuation and whitespace. Addi-
tionally, it should now remove all “unimportant” words. See the comments and examples for
normalise_input for more information.
To achieve this, first complete a helper function filter_words which takes a list of words words
and returns a copy of the list from which all words provided in the list skip_words have been
removed.

3 Complete the function list_of_items (in game.py). It should, given a list of items, produce a
string containing a comma-separated list of item names.

4 Now, using the function list_of_items from the previous question, complete the functions
print_room_items and print_inventory_items according to their respective documentation.

5 Update the function print_room (formerly known as display_room) so that it also prints a list
of items found in the room.

6 Update the function print_menu so that it now prints the list of possible take and drop actions,
in addition to the available exits (these have now been transformed into go actions). See the
documentation in the comments and examples for more information.

7 I have updated the menu and the main functions slightly. The new modus operandi of the main
game loop is as follows:
• The current situation is displayed using print_room (which now additionally prints the
items in the room) and print_inventory_items which shows what the player is carrying.
• The list of actions is shown to the player using the updated menu function, which also takes
the player’s input and normalises it (but does not check for correctness).

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 • Finally, the execute_command function tries to make sense of and execute the player’s
command.

8 The all-important execute_command function has been provided for you. It takes the player’s
input (as a list of words) and, depending on the first word, which is treated as the name of the
action, executes either execute_go, execute_take, or execute_drop. The second word of the
command is supplied as an argument to these functions. The first of these, execute_go, attempts
to move the player in the specified direction (if the direction is a valid exit), the other two update
the inventory and the list of items in a room accordingly. Complete these functions.

The game should be basically playable now. You have at this point achieved a decently smart
Verb-Object parser which “understands” sentences like “I would like to drop my laptop here”.
Moreover, you can now manipulate the game world (carry items around, drop and pick them up).
Next, try making your game more interesting.

9 Add the "mass" property to each item, and modify your game in such a way as to prevent the
player from carrying more than three kilograms (or some other reasonable mass) at any given
time.

10 Define some victory conditions for the game, and check (in the main game loop, after each move)
whether the player has won. For example, the objective may be to find all items in the game and
drop them off at the reception.

Appendix: Changes to the Game Template

• The text processing functions like normalise_input have been moved into a separate
module parser.py.
• The function display_room was renamed print_room for consistency.
• The function print_menu_line was renamed print_exit since the menu now offers not
only a list of exits, but also a list of actions on items.
• The function menu no longer checks for correctness of the command (it is checked else-
where).
• current_room is now a global variable in module player.py.

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