This is something of a departure for me, as I am a keen amateur photographer and this website used to be my photoblog (now residing at fotokay.net).

Anyway, after having spent a lot of time online browsing forum threads, starting new forum threads and reading some excellent tutorials, I’ve decided that I will start off learning Python (version 2, not 3).  To aid this, I will be following the excellently reviewed book “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python” by Al Sweigart.  It is available as a free PDF from his website.

Today I have worked through the first 4 chapters, and can say that the syntax in Python is fairly easy to get my head around.  Chapter four has you building your first game, which is simply a “guess the number” game.  Here’s the code for it – pretty easy to understand!

# This is a guess the number game.
import random

guesses_taken = 0

print "Hello! What is your name?"
my_name = raw_input()

number = random.randint(1,20)
print "Well, " + my_name + ", I am thinking of a number between 1 to 20."

while guesses_taken < 6:
    print "Take a guess."
    guess = raw_input()
    guess = int(guess)

    guesses_taken = guesses_taken + 1

    if guess < number:
        print "Your guess is too low."

    if guess > number:
        print "Your guess is too high."

    if guess == number:
        break

if guess == number:
    guesses_taken = str(guesses_taken)
    print "Good job, " + my_name + "! You guessed my number in " + guesses_taken + " guesses!"

if guess != number:
    number = str(number)
    print "Nope. The number I was thinking of was " + number

And here is the result when the code is actually run: