8. Powerups

Series

You are reading Part 8 of the Space Shooter Tutorial.

Tip

In this chapter, we will learn how to add two different powerups to the game.

Adding powerups

We will add two objects called "PowerupHealth" and "PowerupShield." Select the "powerup_health.png" image from the assets folder for the health object. Repeat the same process for shield object by choosing the "powerup_shield.png" image. In the end, you should see:

Then create an object group called "Powerups."

Animating the player

We are using animations to change the player's sprite when the player collides with PowerupShield. Open the player's properties panel and enter "PlayerIdle" in Animation#0. Then add a new animation called "PlayerShield," and select "player_shield.png" from the assets folder.

Giving extra health to the player

We are ready to open the "Events" page. We will add a new condition to check the collision between the Player and the PowerupHealth objects. If the collision happens, we want to increase the player's health by 30 and delete the powerup object since we do not need it anymore.

Tip

You can add a comment to classify your events.

Now, we are going you use a new scene variable for the shield object. Create a new scene variable called "PowerupShield" to prevent getting any damage while using this powerup. Enter 0 as a default value.

Go to the "IsDamaged" condition and add a new condition to check if the PowerupShield variable is equal to 0.

Tip

We are going to use this condition to prevent getting damaged while using the powerup.

In the end, you should see:

Create a new condition for detecting the collision between the Player and the PowerupShield objects. Then, add an action to change the animation of the player. Select Player, and choose "Change the animation (by name)" and enter "PlayerShield" in the name field.

Then, add some further actions to set "PowerupShield" to 1, delete the "PowerupShield" object, and reset a timer called "PowerupShield." In the end, you should see these events:

Tip

We will use this timer to determine the usage of powerup in the next steps.

Add a new condition to check whether the "PowerupShield" variable is equal to 1 or not. Then, add a sub-event to check the timer called "PowerupShield" is greater than 5 seconds.

Finally, we are going to set "PowerupShield" and "IsDamaged" variables to 0 and change the animation of the player to "PlayerIdle." We also need to reset the timer called "PowerupShield." In the end, your events should look like this:

Testing out

Before testing powerups, we should change the scale of powerup objects just like in the previous cases. Select Powerups object group and set scale factor to 1.5:

Then, open the scene view and drag and drop the powerup objects to the scene. We are ready to run the game. Now you can see the powerups on the scene. If you collect health's powerup, the player's health will be increased by 30. If you collect the shield's powerup, the player's sprite will be changed, and you will not get damaged for 5 seconds.

Next step

Space Shooter, Part 9