As I announced in the last post, I am extremely busy right now. Luckily for you, a member of the community has already stepped up and written a Part 13 for this side scrolling tutorial! In this tutorial, you’ll learn to create “bumper” objects for your enemies to interact with, which will let them patrol back and forth. You’ll also look for collisions between the player and the enemies, so you can take damage in your game. Cool!

I’ll hand it over now to the newest guest writer around here, Ed Nordmeyer (thanks, Ed!)

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Ben covered creating enemies and making them disappear when they’re shot in lesson 12, so in lucky lesson 13, in this guest tutorial, I’ve picked up where the last lesson left off in the side scrolling platform game.

This will cover making the enemies move, how to block them in so they’ll patrol in a simple side-to-side motion, and have them interact with your player if they touch you. Following in Ben’s footsteps, if I had to choose between making the code readable or making the code ultra efficient and take up the least amount of lines, I tried to make the code as easy as possible to understand.

Creating the Bumper class

If you’ve followed the tutorial steps so far, you’ll find that creating the bumper class is very, very similar to the other classes made so far. For the artwork, I just made a square that was about a 25×25 pixels in size. I created this block on the background layer outside of what the player screen shows when you’re running the game. We’ll go back and made the blocks transparent later, but for now I’d recommend making them easy to see to help placing them on the screen from our code.

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