Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps Transcripts
Chapter: App 7: Wizard Battle App
Lecture: Exploring specialized (derived) classes

Learn more about this course
Login or purchase this course to watch this video and the rest of the course contents.
0:00 So we basically have a working game here,
0:03 I guess one final thing to consider is what happens
0:05 if there are no more creatures,
0:07 so we can come down here and add one more part after this section here
0:10 and say if not creatures
0:14 and we'll leverage the implicit truthiness of collections,
0:18 this is a list of creatures, if it's empty, it'll be false.
0:21 So then we'll say print, something like you defeated all the creatures,
0:25 and then we'll just exit, like so, let's just test that super quick,
0:31 I'm not sure we'll be able to defeat the evil wizard of 1000
0:35 so let's just there is a theoretical chance but- it's not so high,
0:40 so let's go over here and just comment out the wizard for just a minute,
0:44 so here we can attack all the creatures,
0:47 how many are left- oh, it looks like we defeated all the creatures,
0:50 well done, game over, perfect.
0:52 So our game is working, but it's kind of blunt and basically
0:58 the only factor we have to consider here in the entire game play is that number,
1:03 what is the level of our creature
1:06 and what is the level of our wizard and then its randomness.
1:10 Do you feel like a fighting a toad should be equivalent of fighting the dragon
1:13 or fighting evil wizard should be the same as fighting a standard like bat,
1:18 probably not, not only do they have different ways to fight
1:22 but the properties that you would take into consideration
1:25 around how they would fight would be different,
1:29 maybe a toad's worthiness would have some sort of factor there
1:33 and if a dragon had scales maybe you would consider
1:36 like how thick his scales were
1:38 or if he was a fire breathing dragon or something like this.
1:41 But if we just use our creature class let's go over to that
1:45 if we just use our creature class here,
1:47 it doesn't model scales or worthiness or whether it breaths fire,
1:52 it simply is the most common denominator thing that models all creatures, right,
1:58 they have names and levels.
2:00 And that's exactly what we want we want to have this sort of commonality
2:03 so regardless the type of creature we are fighting, we can just use that, ok.
2:09 So let's add 1 more feature that will give us a little flexibility
2:12 to this creature class and then we are going to look at
2:15 how we create other classes based off of creature
2:17 and use inheritance and polymorphism in that kind of thing.
2:22 Let's add a method say def and we'll say get_defensive_roll() or something like that.
2:32 Now up here we just had the creature do the roll directly here
2:37 but rather than do this let's comment this out,
2:41 and let's say we'll go to the creature and we'll say get_defensive_roll(),
2:45 and it's up to the creature to take all of its attributes into account,
2:49 if it's a dragon, let's think about its scaliness,
2:51 if it's a toad, it's worthiness or whatever, right,
2:55 we can make our game behave exactly the same
2:58 if we just use sort of the same algorithm, we randomly compute our 1 to 12 number,
3:04 that's throwing a 12 sided dice and then we are going to multiply that by the level,
3:08 and that's what the base creature does,
3:11 but maybe we'll do something different for a dragon,
3:13 if we can invent this idea of a dragon and so on.
3:16 So let's just make sure we can still play the game,
3:19 so we are going to look around and we see a level 1 toad so let's attack it, excellent,
3:24 toad rolls 2 let's look around again,
3:30 now we see the evil wizard let's attack it just to see that it's throwing something high,
3:33 oh we've been defeated, it rolled 5000,
3:37 of course we've been defeated.
3:40 So now let's go back and think about our creatures here.
3:43 We want to categorize these different things,
3:47 these different fighters into more specialized versions of creatures,
3:52 so maybe a toad and a bat maybe we would actually want
3:56 to call these like small animals here,
3:59 so let me just sort of sketch this out,
4:01 so maybe these would be something like small animals, and small animals let's see,
4:06 small animals would have the same properties as the creatures
4:09 but maybe they would have some diminished sort of throw to save or as the tiger,
4:15 maybe this is a predator, dragon maybe this would be a dragon
4:20 and maybe to the dragon we could say scaliness = 20 or whatever
4:26 a scaliness factor is right
4:29 and that might be considered when the dragon is fighting,
4:31 if it has more scales it's even harder to beat
4:34 and then similarly maybe the wizard maybe it has some type of magic
4:37 and it somehow takes that into account as well, right,
4:40 so maybe we put a wizard here, this isn't going to turn out really well for us, so far,
4:46 first of all we don't have small animals, right,
4:51 these are not a thing we are modelling, and we don't have a dragon,
4:55 let me just comment those out for a minute, we do have a wizard,
4:59 now if I try to run this it's probably not going to work so well, a wizard has appeared,
5:03 let's attack it; oh bam, the wizard doesn't have this concept of a defensive roll, Hum?
5:11 all the creatures in our game are supposed
5:14 to sort of have this commonality of everything that is a creature
5:18 and then some specialization in them.
5:20 So let's take a moment and look at this core concept
5:22 called inheritance that allows us
5:25 to sort of layer on this specialization and share attributes and behavior
5:29 across these different types of creatures in our game
5:32 and then we'll come back and add it to our classes.