• OPENING SCENE
• Introduction
• Jumping Right In
• Jumping Right In
• Choose your own Adventure
• Getting Started
• Building a World
• Adding Movement
• Create a Game Space
• Making Things Happen
• Adding a Reward
• Hazards and Enemies
• Adding Game States
• GAME MECHANICS
• Game Mechanic: Add a Countdown Timer
• Game Mechanic: Jumping on Enemies
• Game Mechanic: Player Health
• Game Mechanic: Longer Jumps if Holding Jump Down
• Game Mechanic: Smaller Sprite Collision Boxes
• Game Mechanic: Extending the Game Size
• Game Mechanic: Adding Levels
• Game Mechanic: Keys and Doors
• ADDING POLISH
• Polish: Animate Sprite when Zapped
• Polish: Scaling our Game and Sprites
• Polish: Screen Shake
• Polish: Add Soundtrack Music
• Polish: Explosions using Particles
• Appendix
• Summary of our approach to learning Game Making
• How we approach Coding
• Playful and Reflective Approaches

Game Mechanic: Jumping on Enemies

The game mechanic of jumping on enemies to get rid of them has been made very popular by Mario games. It is a great way to use the jumping dynamic in a creative way.

We can use the same technique as many Mario games use to do this. An enemy will kill our player unless our player is falling when they make contact.

Check the Code: what we need to know and do

Our mechanic relies on us being able to check if we are jumping on our enemy. We will do this by checking to see if our player is on the way up or coming down from a jump. To do this we'll need to know about the following game elements;

• Adding Physics and Gravity - see Building a World
• Collision detection using overlap() function- see Adding a Reward

Going over the code:

Have a look at an updated hitHazard function for the code that checks to see;

var hitHazard = function (player, hazard) {
    if (hazard.type === "enemy" && player.body.velocity.y > 0){
      hazard.kill();
    }
    else {
      player.kill();
    }
};

While it was not really needed for this minimal example, there this function makes distinction between this enemy and other possible different hazard types that might be in the group.

To make this work this involved adding the following line of code when creating our enemy in the create function.

    enemy1.type = "enemy";

That's it. We hope you enjoy adding this game dynamic to your game to jump on enemies.