Question about parameters (dungeon game)

There is a lot to answer in this so bear with me.

There is a question of scope. CELLS is defined globally in the script. From what I remember of this tutorial, CELLS is a list of 2-tuples, like (1, 0). A function has access to globally defined variables, so there is no need to pass it to the function to operate on it. The function get locations, using random.sample(CELLS, 3) returns a list of three tuples in this case, the statement monster, player, door = get_locations(), means that the return of the function, the list, gets unpacked sequentially and assigned in turn to the variables monster, player and door. I think simply your function is too busy you are creating a tuple of three tuples, and returning that tuple to be unpacked into three variables.

Your code should in principle work, you end up returning a tuple (monster, player, door), which you could then use as it is and slice into it to get at the contents, or unpack it again.

When you define a function, a_function(), what you put in the parentheses are the arguments for the function. Writing CELLS in the get_location function () does not guarantee that CELLS will be passed into the function.

def get_locations(CELLS):

means that the get_locations function takes an argument called CELLS, but you could pass anything in when calling the function, say an integer. Now in your case since CELLS is defined globally, if you pass CELLS into the function that takes an argument called CELLS, then you will have CELLS used in the function, but you could also have defined something called new_cells which is an identical list of 2-tuples, and called get_locations(new_cells) and seen the same output.

you could use a keyword argument in the defining of the function, get_locations(CELLS=CELLS), then when you called get_locations(), without any arguments, you would also see the same output.

let me know if I can explain that better....