sprite.setPosition and sprite.body.reset

igrep · June 21, 2025, 4:19pm

Hello, I’m new to Phaser and game development. I’m currently porting the tutorial in MDN called “2D breakout game using Phaser” to Phaser 3. I finished porting all the example application today, and then got a question related to the title “sprite.setPosition and sprite.body.reset.”

When I implemented the initial version of the lesson 16, I found that the ball in the game was placed at lower than expected to sink into the paddle a little (like the following screenshot of the lesson 15), which resulted in the unexpected collision of the ball and the paddle in lesson 16.

As I investitagted and fixed it by this commit, the cause was that I used the ball’s setPosition method instead of the ball.body’s reset method when moving the ball back to the origin. However, I failed to be sure why reset works better than setPosition here in this case. How do they differ?

The entire source code is available here:

github.com/igrep/2D_Breakout_game_Phaser

lesson16.html

792bd700e

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en-US">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>Gamedev Phaser Workshop - lesson 16: Randomizing gameplay</title>
    <style>
    * {
      padding: 0;
      margin: 0;
    }
    </style>
    <script src="js/phaser.min.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <script>
    class Example extends Phaser.Scene {
      ball;
      paddle;
      bricks;

This file has been truncated. show original

samme · June 21, 2025, 4:59pm

This may be because reset() clears the body position delta. It’s almost always a good idea to use reset in these situations. You can also omit setVelocity(0) since that’s included.

igrep · June 22, 2025, 12:05pm

Your suggestion worked! Thanks!

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sprite.setPosition and sprite.body.reset

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