Damage VFX using Animated Sprites in Unity
Damage VFX on the Player
A Gameobject player, 2 gameobjects with animated sprites showing the spaceship damage, and laser-player script communication.
The first step is pretty simple, create 2 empty gameobjects inside the player and attach them an Animator component with their respective animations
Place your disabled Gameobject animations under your player and they will follow the player movement even if they are deactivated
Now we open our projectile script and make use of the OnTriggerEnter2D() Unity Event
OnTriggerEnter2D gives us the information of the GameObject that collided with us(laser)
Step by step:
1- We check if we collided with an object with the tag “Player”.
2- We get the player reference finding the GameObject Player and getting the player script component Player
Remember to declare the variable to store the player reference first
3-Null check, if we successfully get the player script, we call the Damage function in our player script. We’ll check the implementation later.
4-We destroy the laser projectile.
After saving and going back into Unity, open the Player script and get into the damage function implementation. In this function, when we receive damage we subtract a life with _lives — ;. We also call another method called CheckEnginesVisual(). Here is where the magic happens. Let´s get into it.
For this we will need the engines GameObject references:
GameObject Engines reference
Both engine references must be dragged to the player in the Unity Editor to work!
Remember: Good practices in programming say that we should always keep every variable private unless the value is going to be accessed or modified by an external script.
CheckEnginesVisual implementation.
If the player gets damaged, we activate and deactivate the engines whenever is needed.
And that would be it for our Damage VFX implementation!