Chapter 6. Diving In – Enemies

Would Super Mario be complete without Goombas, Halo without Grunts, or Portal without GLaDOS? No. No real game is complete without some solid enemies. That's just what we are going to work on in this chapter, because Kevin needs someone to stop him from rescuing Dom, right? Let's see what we are going to talk about.

• Creating various enemies to make things difficult for Kevin

• Making our enemies move, including a path finding system

• How to make our enemies attack Kevin

• How to give our enemies health and make them die too

Let's make things hard for Kevin.

Creating enemies

Let's start setting up our enemies. If you haven't drawn some up yet, no worries, you can use the ones I've created. Import all the enemy images into our project and create a new actor from the images. Open it up so we can bring the enemy to life.

First thing we should do is change his Bounciness to 0; we don't want him bouncing all over the place.

Secondly, we want to drag in a Collide behavior, and change the options so it's colliding with Any actor in the Platform tag.

If you want, you can de-select the Fixed Rotation option under the Physics drop down. This way, if your enemy falls off a platform, he doesn't flip around like crazy and fall flat on his face. For this guy, however, I am going to allow him to automatically rotate because when he reaches inclines and declines, I want him to rotate accordingly.

I also changed his Max Speed option to 250 so he doesn't start moving superfast.

Tip

Try this

Do you want an infinite horde of enemies instead of having to place them all...

Summary

Our game is getting more and more functional as we go on. Wow! We created some great enemies for our game. We even programmed a simple Artificial Intelligence system that helps them move around without pre-defining paths for them. Then we gave them health so that they can get hurt too! Let's be honest, Kevin is the one that is suppose to do the hurting, not just the enemies! Kevin has such a hard life.

We are almost done with the major mechanics of the game. In the next chapter, we are going to finish it up. We are going to look at doing some objectives, and then we will talk about what you can do with your game when you've finished reading this book.

On to the next chapter!