Making your character jump

Imagine that you grew up playing games, such as Pitfall, Super Mario Bros, or Metroid (it's likely the case for many of you). Now imagine playing these games without a jump button. You couldn't, could you? Of course not; these games feature jumping over obstacles and between platforms as a major gameplay element. Now, imagine you want to make your own platforming game. How would you make your character jump? Let's find out!

Getting ready

You'll need a character with movement controls, not unlike the ones you may have by following the preceding recipes. A jump animation is a good thing to have as well. It's not absolutely necessary, but I wrote the following code to incorporate one. You'll also need ground objects and any platforms you wish to have. You need to create one object with no sprite and call it obj_ground_parent. From there, you can create your platforms and ground objects with appropriate sprites, but make sure they all have obj_ground_parent listed as...