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Phaser: Keyboard events

Published Apr 20 2021

This post is part of a Phaser series. Click here to see the first post of the series.

Mouse events are fired on a GameObject, because with the mouse we click on elements.

With the keyboard instead we press keys, not linked to any GameObject in particular.

So we listen for those events on this.input.keyboard, like this:

this.input.keyboard.on(<event>, function() {

})

<event> is a string that can be keyup or keydown, to intercept all keys pressed, or a combination of it with a letter identifying a specific key, like:

• keyup-A
• keyup-THREE
• keydown-F12
• keydown-ENTER

We have a large number of identifiers we can use, including:

• A ~ Z
• F1 ~ F12
• BACKSPACE
• TAB
• ENTER
• SHIFT
• CTRL. ALT
• PAUSE
• CAPS_LOCK
• ESC
• SPACE
• PAGE_UP, PAGE_DOWN
• END, HOME
• LEFT, UP, RIGHT,DOWN
• PRINT_SCREEN
• INSERT, DELETE
• ZERO, ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT, NINE
• NUMPAD_ZERO, NUMPAD_ONE, NUMPAD_TWO, NUMPAD_THREE, NUMPAD_FOUR, NUMPAD_FIVE, NUMPAD_SIX, NUMPAD_SEVEN, NUMPAD_EIGHT, NUMPAD_NINE, NUMPAD_ADD, NUMPAD_SUBTRACT

Instead of listenining on individual keys, we can get an object calling this.input.keyboard.createCursorKeys():

let cursors

function create() {
  cursors = this.input.keyboard.createCursorKeys()
}

and in the update() function, we can check if one specific key has been pressed, and do something when this happens:

function update() {
  if (cursors.right.isDown) {
    text.x += 5
  }
  if (cursors.left.isDown) {
    text.x -= 5
  }
  if (cursors.up.isDown) {
    text.y -= 5
  }
  if (cursors.down.isDown) {
    text.y -= 5
  }
}