Number-guessing game using functions

Question

First time writing a "game" in a sense. Used a functions approach, it's simple, looking for a review of the way it's written and of course looking for how should it be written. Also using random for first time (I know I'm a nube).

#Number Guess Game

import random

def gameNumber():
     while True:
        difficulty = input("Type: E, M, H for easy, medium, or hard number range:\n").lower()    

        if difficulty == 'e':
            return random.randint(0,20)

        elif difficulty == 'm':
            return random.randint(0,50)

        elif difficulty == 'h':
            return random.randint(0,100)

        else:
            print("Incorrect input")


def numberGuessGame():
    number = gameNumber()
    while True:        
        try:  
           guess = int(input("Your guess: "))
           if number == guess:
               print("Correct guess!\n")
               return numberGuessGame() if input("play again?(y/any key to exit) ").lower() == 'y' else 0
           print("Too High" if number < guess else "Too Low")            
        except ValueError:
            print("must be an integer value\n")


def main():
    numberGuessGame()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Answer 1

What you have is very good and it certainly functions as expected. I have just a few ideas to consider implementing (more in relation to the game than the code):

• Print the number ranges for each difficulty at the start, so that the user knows what range to guess in.
• Check if the guess is outside the range.
• Count the number of guesses and report back to the user at the end.
• Edit the prompts slightly so user knows when input is expected.

I have shown my code below, implementing these features. I reduced it to a single function (to avoid having to use global variables). I have used a dictionary to store the top end of the range of each difficulty (difficulty_ranges) so this can be checked easily later, using fewer if else checks.

I also corrected a few PEP8 style warnings (spacing, use snake case instead of camel case for function name etc).

import random


def number_guess_game():
    # Set up main variables
    guesses = 0
    difficulty_ranges = {'e': 20, 'm': 50, 'h': 100}

    while True:
        difficulty = input(
            "Type E, M or H for easy (0-20), medium (0-50), or hard (0-100) number range:\n").lower()
        try:
            number = random.randint(0, difficulty_ranges[difficulty])
            break  # Need to break the while loop here
        except KeyError:
            print("Incorrect input! Choose again...")  # Encourage user input

    while True:
        try:
            guess = int(input("Your guess: "))
            guesses += 1
            if number == guess:
                print("Correct guess! You used {} guesses.".format(guesses))
                return number_guess_game() if input(
                    "Play again? Press Y to play again or any key to exit.").lower() == 'y' else 0
            elif guess < 0 or guess > difficulty_ranges[difficulty]:
                print("Your guess was out of range!")
            else:
                print("Too High. Guess again..." if number < guess else "Too Low. Guess again...")
        except ValueError:
            print("Must be an integer value.\n")


def main():
    number_guess_game()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

I should add that I am not a Python expert, so other users will likely provide more useful information on the code. I think your layout is good and the logic is easy to follow. I wanted to suggest a few of these extra features as it is a game and these may improve the experience.

Answer 2

Chris has made some good UX improvements, and mentioned some nice code review points. I won’t duplicate those.

He also fell into the same trap: recursion is not meant as a looping substitute!

def numberGuessGame():
    ...
               return numberGuessGame() if input("play again?(y/any key to exit) ").lower() == 'y' else 0
    ...

If Python had tail-recursion-optimization, you could almost argue this as valid, reasonable code. But it doesn’t, so you can’t.

Consider: to test your code, I might write a program which runs your program, and plays for say 1,000,000 games. Perhaps it is some kind of neural network and it is learning how to best play; maybe 1,000,000 games is a reasonable training set. But your program will quickly crash with a stack-overflow, because each game doesn’t return until the last game has been played.

Instead of using recursion, how about using a loop?

def numberGuessGame():
    play_again = 'y'            # play the first time
    while play_again == 'y':

        ...
        while True:
            ...
                if number == guess:
                    print("Correct guess\n")
                    break
            ...

        play_again = input("play again?(y/any key to exit) ").lower()