Question

I am developing a simple platform game in Java using BlueJ.

Over the next few weeks I will be posting a few questions asking for help with this project as am not very proficient at programming. So I hope I don’t become annoying and I would be very grateful if you can kindly help me.

In my game I have a gameOver method which ends the game and prints a statement to the console. What I would like is to call upon this method when my player sprite ‘falls off’ the screen.

Right now I have a rectangle shape placed at the bottom of the screen to represent some kind of hazard (like water) and when the player collides with it, it calls the gameOver method and the game ends. However, I would still prefer if the game ended if the player fell below a certain height of the screen.

This is my gameOver method (from the ‘Game’ class)-

/** End the game. */ public void gameOver() {     world.terminate();     isOver = true; } 

This is my player sprite (currently drawn using a polygon)-

super(Utils.createPolygon(170, 102,     155, 118, 137, 118, 151, 134, 146,     140, 167, 140, 170, 135, 174, 140,     193, 140, 188, 134, 202, 118, 186,     118, 170, 102));  setColor(new Color(254, 167, 184)); 

This is the code (from the ‘Enemy’ class, similar code is used in a Hazard class also) that ends the game when player collides with an enemy-

if (e.contact.involves(player) && (player.getLives() < 1)) {     System.out.println('YOU ARE DEAD!');     game.gameOver(); } 

I would like a similar, or at least simple solution that will call on my gameOver method when my player sprite falls or goes beyond a certain coordinate of the screen.

I would appreciate it if you could kindly provide a sample/example code, with comments to help me understand it, in order to give an idea of what I should do to achieve this.

Thank you very much and I look forward to your answers.

Answer 1

To get you started:

1. Think about how you might get the player’s current position.
2. Think about what makes the player fall (there should be some method/class that implements gravity and falling?)
3. Check the player’s position as they fall against the boundries of your world. If they’re outside the boundries, it’s time to call your GameOver method.

To check the boundries:

1. Your world should have a minimum height that the player has to keep above to stay alive. Remember this value.
2. If you get your player’s vertical position and compare to this minimum height, you should get a boolean result (safe vs. dead).
3. Note that screen position starts at the top left and increases as you go right and down, so you’re player position probably reflects this. Thus, you’re most likely looking for the test (player.getPosition().Y > world.getMaxAllowedHeight());

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For reference: Please post what you’ve tried already and where you’re having problems. Asking for a spoonfed solution isn’t going to help anyone – you’re going to have to think about this a bit yourself. If you have no idea where to start, tell us that instead; we can try to steer you in the right direction.

Update: Sounds like you’ve done a bit of thinking already, which is great! Sorry if I was harsh to jump down your throat, but your original post suggested otherwise. Next time, though, do try to ask a more help-me-help-myself question than a solve-it-for-me one. A simple ‘Can someone give me an idea of how to start tackling this problem?’ will do.