Free online courseHow to make a game Platformer 2D in Java

Course Description

Create a complete 2D platformer from scratch while strengthening your Java fundamentals and building practical game development skills. This free online course guides you through the real decisions behind a playable game: how to open a reliable Swing window, capture responsive input, and draw smooth graphics without flicker. You will move beyond isolated snippets and learn how systems fit together to form a game that feels tight, readable, and expandable.

Step by step, you will shape a solid foundation around timing and performance. You will implement a controllable game loop, understand why separating updates from rendering matters, and keep motion consistent across different machines. From there, you will bring the world to life with sprite atlases, animation control, and a player that moves convincingly with gravity, jumping, and robust collision rules that prevent clipping through tiles.

As the project grows, you will learn how to organize code so it stays maintainable: using game states to switch cleanly between gameplay, menus, pause overlays, options, and game over screens. You will also tackle essential game feel features such as scrolling levels, parallax backgrounds, UI buttons with proper visual states, and audio that behaves predictably across screens.

The course rounds out the experience by adding enemies with patrol and attack behavior, interactive objects, traps, cannons, projectiles, health bars, multiple levels, and tools to build your own stages from images. Along the way, you will practice debugging and polishing edge cases such as focus loss, state resets after restart, and consistent collision checks. By the end, you will have a working platformer framework you can extend with new characters, levels, and mechanics—ideal for a portfolio piece or a starting point for your next game.