Simple Python Battleship game

Question

I recently started learning python and decided to try and make my first project. I'm trying to make a battleship game that randomly places two 3 block long ships on a board. But it doesn't work quite right. I made a while loop for ship #2 that's supposed to check and see if two spaces next to it are free, then build itself there. But sometimes it just slaps itself on top of where ship #1 already is. can someone help me out? Here's the first part of the code: ``` from random import randint ###board: board = [] for x in range(7): board.append(["O"] * 7) def print_board(board): for row in board: print " ".join(row) ###ships' positions: #ship 1 def random_row(board): return randint(0, len(board) - 1) def random_col(board): return randint(0, len(board[0]) - 1) row_1 = random_row(board) col_1 = random_col(board) #ship 2 row_2 = random_row(board) col_2 = random_col(board) def make_it_different(r,c): while r == row_1 and c == col_1: r = random_row(board) c = random_col(board) row_2 = r col_2…

Accepted Answer

I'd recommend allowing your placing code to run through simply and without if statements, it will be much cleaner. Then, at the end, you can check to see if any of the pieces overlap, and if they do reset.

Depending on how you end up deciding to store the points that the individual ships lie in, maybe a list of tuples. You could do this

the place ship method could return a list of tuples (points)

```
def placeShip():
    points = []

# put random point generation here

for point in points:
        if point in otherShipPoints:
            return placeShip()         # overlap detected, redo ship placement

return points
```

Put your placement code in a single function so that it can be called this way simply. Your code is starting to get messy and I recommend going to an approach like this to keep from running into spaghetti code problems.

You could also give `placeShip()` a parameter for the size of ship you want to add, then this method could be your all-in-one ship placer. Just make your function look like this `placeShip(size)` and then randomly generate that many points within your grid

Simple Python Battleship game

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