unable to make character jump in Pygame endless jumper

Question

I am trying to recreate the dinosaur game from google and I am at the stage of making my character jump but I can't get it to work so Im wondering if someone can help me get my character to jump. what I tried to do was use a for loop to make the player go up then wait then use another for loop to make it go down but when I press the up key to make it jump it doesn't do a thing it doesn't give me a error either. Here is my attempt at jump code

for x in range(0, 60):
    player_y -= player_vel
    time.sleep(0.5)
for x in range(0, 60):
    player_y += player_vel
            

Answer 1

Do not try to control the game with an additional loop in the application loop. Use the application loop. Add the variables is_jumping adn jump_count:

is_jumping = False
jump_count = 0

Use pygame.time.Clock to control the frames per second and thus the game speed.

The method tick() of a pygame.time.Clock object, delays the game in that way, that every iteration of the loop consumes the same period of time. See pygame.time.Clock.tick():

This method should be called once per frame.

That means that the loop:

clock = pygame.time.Clock()
run = True
while run:
   clock.tick(50)

runs 50 times per second.

Use the KEYDOWN event instead of pygame.key.get_pressed() to jump:

run = True
while run:
    clock.tick(50)

    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            run = False
        if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
            if event.key == pygame.K_UP and not is_jumping:
                is_jumping = True
                jump_count = 30

pygame.key.get_pressed() returns a list with the state of each key. If a key is held down, the state for the key is True, otherwise False. Use pygame.key.get_pressed() to evaluate the current state of a button and get continuous movement.
The keyboard events (see pygame.event module) occur only once when the state of a key changes. The KEYDOWN event occurs once every time a key is pressed. KEYUP occurs once every time a key is released. Use the keyboard events for a single action.

Change the position of the player depending on is_jumping adn jump_count in the application loop:

while run:
    # [...]

    #movement code
    if is_jumping and jump_count > 0:
        if jump_count > 15:
            player_y -= player_vel
            jump_count -= 1
        elif jump_count > 0:
            player_y += player_vel  
            jump_count -= 1 
        is_jumping = jump_count > 0    

---

Complete example:

import pygame

pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((800, 600))
pygame.display.set_caption("Infinite Runner")

#defines the paremeters for the wall
wall_x = 800
wall_y = 300
wall_width = 20
wall_height = 20

score = 0

player_x = 400
player_y = 300
player_width = 40
player_height = 60
player_vel = 5

is_jumping = False
jump_count = 0

#where the main code is run
print(score)
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
run = True
while run:
    clock.tick(50)

    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            run = False
        if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
            if event.key == pygame.K_UP and not is_jumping:
                is_jumping = True
                jump_count = 30

    #movement code
    if is_jumping and jump_count > 0:
        if jump_count > 15:
            player_y -= player_vel
            jump_count -= 1
        elif jump_count > 0:
            player_y += player_vel  
            jump_count -= 1 
        is_jumping = jump_count > 0    
   
    #draws the player and the coin
    screen.fill((0,0,0))
    wall = pygame.draw.rect(screen, (244, 247, 30), (wall_x, wall_y, wall_width, wall_height))
    player = pygame.draw.rect(screen, (255, 255, 255), (player_x, player_y, player_width, player_height))     
    pygame.display.update()

pygame.quit()