Pressing SHIFT interrupts holding down W in pygame

Question

I am making a roguelike in Pygame. I am trying to make my character move forward with either the W or the UP key. When SHIFT is held down, movement should be twice as fast. If I hold down SHIFT and then press W, the program works as it should, however, if I am holding down W, and the character is already moving forward, and then I press SHIFT, the character stops. This happens only occasionally, but it needs to be fixed.

    character_pos = [0,0]
    move_speed = 1
    mods = pygame.key.get_mods()
    if mods & KMOD_SHIFT:
        move_speed = 2
    key = pygame.key.get_pressed()
    if key[pygame.K_w] or key[pygame.K_UP]:
        w_count += move_speed
        if w_count == 20:
            w_count = 0
            if not is_wall(character_pos[0], character_pos[1]-1):
                character_pos[1] -= 1

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If w_count starts at 0 and is incremented in steps of either 1 or 2, it will always pass 20 as it increases. But if it is incremented by a combination of 1s and 2s, it might go from 19 to 21. Could that be the problem? Try changing if w_count == 20 to if w_count >= 20.

Apologies if I have misunderstood your code, I'm not 100% clear on the purpose of the counter.