Falling Down - Disable Some Phaser World Bounds Checks

Since adding the ability to have more than one level in the platformer I'm building with Phaser, I actually created a second level. Like many platformers, it has...ummm...platforms. What I mean is that unlike my first test level that just had the ground and some boxes to jump on, this second level has no ground and is just a bunch floating clouds on which to jump. If you miss your platform and fall to the bottom of the world, you die.

Hey, you! Get off of my cloud!

Well, not really. The way the game worked was that the player just landed on the bottom of the world bounds and stood there. When I create the player's frog Sprite, I turn on collision with the world bounds. What are the world bounds? Basically that's the defined map. The world bounds collision check prevents the player from walking off the world on the far left and right, but it also prevents the player from falling through the bottom or jumping off the top.

var frog = group.create(50, 50, 'frog');
game.physics.enable(frog, Phaser.Physics.ARCADE);

// stay inside the world boundaries
frog.body.collideWorldBounds = true;

I had a hard time finding an example of what I wanted to do. I performed a great number of fruitless searches, which is fine because I wasn't really looking for fruit. I just wanted to find the easiest way to keep the left/right/top world collisions but turn off the bottom. I read some rather complex solutions that actually replaced the bounds check function on the Sprite, but the simplest solution turns out to be really...simple.

First, the player's frog object needs some minor settings adjusted.

frog.checkWorldBounds = true;
frog.outOfBoundsKill = true;

I already had collideWorldBounds set to true on the physics body, but I also need to set the checkWorldBounds property directly on the Sprite to true. By itself, this has no effect, but it is necessary if I also want to set the outOfBoundsKill property to true. Independent of the physics collisions, these two settings tell Phaser to check on each frame to see if the sprite in question is inside the bounds of the world, and if not, to kill it.

With just this change made to the frog, nothing seems any different. The player can't actually fall or walk off the world because collideWorldBounds is also set to true. It takes just one more line of code to turn off the bottom-of-the-world bounds check and allow the frog to fall to his death. Here it is, on line 6 below:

function create() {

    game.physics.startSystem(Phaser.Physics.ARCADE);

    // turn off the collision with the bottom of the world
    game.physics.arcade.checkCollision.down = false;

    // ... other stuff ...

}

As you can see, I make this adjustment immediately after starting the physics system. I only turn off the down collision checks, but you could just as easily turn off up, left, or right depending on your game's needs.

Now the frog can't walk off the left or right of the map but can fall in a hole or off a platform. If you want to see the complete source code for the game, it is freely available on GitHub. If you want to see today's Amphibian.com comic, it is also freely available. Just click on the image of the first frame below...

Amphibian.com comic for 4 January 2016