Making your first Phaser 3 game

We've got some lovely tempting platforms, but no-one to run around them. Let's rectify that.

Create a new variable called player and add the following code to the create function. You can see this in part5.html:

player = this.physics.add.sprite(100, 450, 'dude');

player.setBounce(0.2);
player.setCollideWorldBounds(true);

this.anims.create({
    key: 'left',
    frames: this.anims.generateFrameNumbers('dude', { start: 0, end: 3 }),
    frameRate: 10,
    repeat: -1
});

this.anims.create({
    key: 'turn',
    frames: [ { key: 'dude', frame: 4 } ],
    frameRate: 20
});

this.anims.create({
    key: 'right',
    frames: this.anims.generateFrameNumbers('dude', { start: 5, end: 8 }),
    frameRate: 10,
    repeat: -1
});

There are two separate things going on here: the creation of a Physics Sprite and the creation of some animations that it can use.

Physics Sprite

The first part of the code creates the sprite:

player = this.physics.add.sprite(100, 450, 'dude');

player.setBounce(0.2);
player.setCollideWorldBounds(true);

This creates a new sprite called player, positioned at 100 x 450 pixels from the bottom of the game. The sprite was created via the Physics Game Object Factory (this.physics.add) which means it has a Dynamic Physics body by default.

After creating the sprite it is given a slight bounce value of 0.2. This means when it lands after jumping it will bounce ever so slightly. The sprite is then set to collide with the world bounds. The bounds, by default, are on the outside of the game dimensions. As we set the game to be 800 x 600 then the player won't be able to run outside of this area. It will stop the player from being able to run off the edges of the screen or jump through the top.

Animations

If you glance back to the preload function you'll see that 'dude' was loaded as a sprite sheet, not an image. That is because it contains animation frames. This is what the full sprite sheet looks like:

There are 9 frames in total, 4 for running left, 1 for facing the camera and 4 for running right. Note: Phaser supports flipping sprites to save on animation frames, but for the sake of this tutorial we'll keep it old school.

We define two animations called 'left' and 'right'. Here is the left animation:

this.anims.create({
    key: 'left',
    frames: this.anims.generateFrameNumbers('dude', { start: 0, end: 3 }),
    frameRate: 10,
    repeat: -1
});

The 'left' animation uses frames 0, 1, 2 and 3 and runs at 10 frames per second. The 'repeat -1' value tells the animation to loop.

This is our standard run-cycle and we repeat it for running in the opposite direction, using the key 'right' and a final one for 'turn'.

Extra Info: In Phaser 3 the Animation Manager is a global system. Animations created within it are globally available to all Game Objects. They share the base animation data while managing their own timelines. This allows you to define a single animation once and apply it to as many Game Objects as you require. This is different to Phaser 2 where animations belonged specifically to the Game Objects they were created on.

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