Curious about the general structure and order of setting things up:

To answer your first question, the COLORS list is declared and set outside of the Monster class because any variable that you set inside the class is actually a class attribute. Since, in this case, we only want a Monster to have one color that is chosen at random from the list of colors, the list itself is not the attribute that we want to give to one of our Monsters, and it, therefore, makes sense to declare our list of colors outside of the class.

For your second question, the attributes that are setup before the __init__ function are the 'default attributes' which will be common to all monsters. The purpose of the __init__ function, in this case however, is to give us a different monster nearly each time a new Monster is created. The attributes of each new monster are then set in __init__ according to the constraints of the default attributes for the Monster class.

Hope that helps!

[Added backticks to __init__ -cf]