Have variables to track the location of the sprite/player. An option would be to have one for which floor and then another for the location within the floor.

You don’t need to store all the characters to be output, that only needs to happen when being output.

It might be helpful to store this in a class and have methods to move the sprite/player around. These methods would do the checking for valid moves.

The class can also have a method for displaying the information.

An example of that might be:

from dataclasses import dataclass
import random


@dataclass
class Building:
    width: int = 20
    height: int = 5
    sprite: chr = "X"
    background: chr = "-"
    width_loc: int = 0
    height_loc: int = 0
    move_size: int = 1

    def show(self):
        print(" 01234567890123456789")
        for floor in range(self.height, 0, -1):
            print(floor, end="")
            for loc in  range(self.width):
                if all((floor == self.height_loc,
                        loc == self.width_loc)):
                    print(self.sprite, end="")
                else:
                    print(self.background, end="")
            print()

    def move_left(self):
        self.width_loc = max(self.width_loc - self.move_size, 0)

    def move_down(self):
        self.height_loc = max(self.height_loc - self.move_size, 1)

    def move_right(self):
        self.width_loc = min(self.width_loc + self.move_size, self.width)

    def move_up(self):
        self.height_loc = min(self.height_loc + self.move_size, self.height)

    def on_release(self, key):
        if key.char == "a":
            self.move_left()
        elif key.char == "d":
            self.move_right()
        elif key.char == "j":
            self.move_up()
        elif key.char == "k":
            self.move_down()
        self.show()

def main():
    # initial location
    ver_loc = random.randint(1, Building.height -1)
    hor_loc = random.randint(0, Building.width - 1)
    print("initial location:", ver_loc, hor_loc)
    building = Building(width_loc=hor_loc, height_loc=ver_loc, move_size=3)

    building.show()
    # New location
    building.move_left()
    building.show()
    building.move_up()
    building.show()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

An example output was:

initial location: 3 4
 01234567890123456789
5--------------------
4--------------------
3----X---------------
2--------------------
1--------------------
 01234567890123456789
5--------------------
4--------------------
3-X------------------
2--------------------
1--------------------
 01234567890123456789
5-X------------------
4--------------------
3--------------------
2--------------------
1--------------------

I haven’t implemented the keyboard listener, but the main method might look like the following with it:

def main():
    # initial location
    ver_loc = random.randint(1, building_height -1)
    hor_loc = random.randint(0, floor_width - 1)
    print(ver_loc, hor_loc)
    building = Building(width_loc=hor_loc, height_loc=ver_loc, move_size=3)
    with Listener(on_release=building.on_release) as listener:
        listener.join()