Damaging the Enemy

Introduction

This tutorial will implement dealing damage to an Enemy. Rather than immediately destroying the Enemy when it collides with a Bullet, we'll implement health points (HP) which can be reduced when an Enemy collides with a Bullet. Once an Enemy's HP is reduced to 0, it will be destroyed.

Adding Enemy HP

Typically enemies will have two values for HP:

• MaxHP - the starting number of HP when an Enemy is first spawned

• CurrentHP - the number of HP that the enemy currently has

The MaxHP is a designer variable - a variable which a game designer may change during the development of the game to adjust difficulty. We'll define this in Glue so it can be changed easily. By contrast, CurrentHP is a logic variable - a variable which is used in game logic and which should not be modified by a game designer. It will initially be assigned to MaxHP and will be reduced whenever the Player takes damage. To define a MaxHP variable:

1. Select the Enemy entity

2. Click on the Variables tab

3. Click the Add New Variable button
4. Select the int type

5. Enter the name MaxHP

6. Click OK
7. Set the new MaxHP variable to 6

Now we can add the CurrentHP value to the Enemy:

1. Open the project in Visual Studio

2. Open Enemy.cs

3. Add the CurrentHp variable and modify CustomInitialize as shown in the following code snippet

public int CurrentHP { get; set; }

private void CustomInitialize()
{
    this.InitializePlatformerInput(new EnemyInput());

    CurrentHP = MaxHP;
}

In a typical game, whenever an Enemy takes damage the game may perform many actions such as:

• Flashing the Enemy or playing some visual effect

• Playing a sound effect

• Showing the amount of damage dealt (as a floating number)

• Modifying how much health is shown in a health bar

• Destroying the Enemy and showing a death effect if the Enemy has died

Keeping this logic in the Enemy.cs file can help keep code organized, so we'll be adding the following function to the Enemy.cs file:

public void TakeDamage(int damageAmount)
{
    CurrentHP -= damageAmount;
    if(CurrentHP <= 0)
    {
        Destroy();
    }
}

Be sure to make the TakeDamage method public so it can be called from outside of the Enemy class.

Bullet vs Enemy Collision

Now we can create a collision relationship between the BulletList and EnemyList objects in the GameScreen:

1. Expand the GameScreen Objects folder

2. Drag+drop the BulletList object onto EnemyList\
3. Select the new BulletListVsEnemyList relationship

4. Click on the Collision tab

5. Click the Add Event button
6. Accept the defaults and click OK

Now we can fill in the event method. Open GameScreen.Event.cs and modify the BulletListVsEnemyListCollisionOccurred method as shown in the following snippet:

void OnBulletListVsEnemyListCollisionOccurred (Entities.Bullet first, Entities.Enemy second)
{
    first.Destroy();
    // assume the bullet only deals 1 damage for now
    second.TakeDamage(1);
}

Now we can shoot at the enemy. After six shots, the enemy is destroyed.

Conclusion

Now we've created a game where we can destroy an enemy with 6 shots. A real game would have more than one enemy, but if we add additional enemies, our game will automatically collide bullets against each enemy, and each enemy will keep track of its own HP.