In order to fix this little dilemma of ours we need to incorporate some screen boundaries to stop our player actor from exiting the screen. The problem with this is that with the camera moving rapidly, but the player actor being stationary without input, it is very easy for the actor to fall off the bottom of the screen and become in active. If you were to test your scene at this point you would see that the camera does in fact scroll northward to the top of the scene at the pace that you set the dummy actor to move. Since all this Dummy Actor will do is move through the scene at a set pace while the camera follows, for ease of use, I just attached these blocks in the actors events opposed to creating a separate behavior. Now, using a few blocks of code, we can make the dummy actor move through the scene and the camera will follow him the whole way. I then drew the player actor about five tiles down, but two layers up, above the background image. I simply drew the dummy actor down at the bottom of the scene, right in what would be the dead center of the screen in a normal sized scene. Placing the Dummy on the very bottom layer of the scene, under the background, makes him invisible to the player, but the camera will still follow him through the scene. How I solved this problem was to create a 'Dummy Actor' that the camera would stay centered on. Well, this doesn't do us any good, because our players roughly 5,000 pixels further down in the scene! This simple problem can be solved with the addition of a camera. That would mean that the default screen position is aligned with the top left corner of the scene. This entails some challenges and obstacles to overcome.įirst off, the default screen position is X=0 and Y=0. The scene is about ten times bigger in height than the standard 15 tile layout. The player sprite starts at the bottom of the scene, and moves to the top of the screen. I am making a game that scrolls vertically. My instance was a little more complicated than this. Then there are others who may need to set boundaries for left, top, and right, but leave the bottom alone, for pitfall style games where you want your player to be able to fall in to traps or large holes. This works for side to side shooters like Galaga, where the player is fixed into a single Y position and can only move on the X axis. Some may need to stop the player actor from leaving just the sides of the screen. We all need this feature for different reasons, at different times. A common question that I run in to all of the time on different Stencyl related forums and blogs is, 'How do I keep my character from leaving the screen?'.

Stencyl tilesets