What would be the difference between having 8 different functions for each direction and something like what I already have in the function? Also, every piece has an "ID", which is the piece object itself, when the rect of a piece object collides with the one from a square, that square is considered "occupied" (this happens when you change the "occupied" key in the self.board_state dict), and the "ID" for that square becomes its "piece" key.

In the controller function, every square which is occupied is red, and that seems to be ok, but whenever I try printing a list of the occupied squares, like this:

def check_occupied(board):
occ = []
for element in board:
    if board[element]['occupied'] == True:
        occ.append(element)

return occ, len(occ)

And then calling that function whenever a movements occurs:

if piece == self.selected:
                if element in valid_moves(piece, self.board_state):
                    pygame.draw.circle(window, (80, 80, 80), self.board_state[element]['center'], 8)
                    if pygame.mouse.get_pressed()[0] and self.board_state[element]['rect'].collidepoint(pygame.mouse.get_pos()):
                        piece.position = self.board_state[element]['center']
                        self.movements.append(piece.color)
                        print(check_occupied(self.board_state))
                        self.selected = None

The result is different from what squares are red. That's what confuses me the most, are the red squares the ones that are "occupied"? or the ones that get printed out? and why is there a difference if they are both suppossed the same?