Powerups are fun to make, but having permanent powerups might make your game too easy. In this article, we’ll go over how to make temporary power-up effects.
2D Space Shooter Example
In my 2D Space Shooter project, I have a powerup called Triple Shot that allows a player to shoot 3 lasers instead of the normal 1 laser. To enable Triple Shot, the player must collect the Triple Shot power-up. When it’s collected, the powerup tells the player that the Triple Shot ability should be enabled.
Our goal is to find a way to turn off the Triple Shot ability during the game. Since the Triple Shot ability is controlled by a boolean value called _canTripleShot, we want to create a way to schedule _canTripleShot to become false. Since we are trying to schedule an action, we’ll use a coroutine to solve our problem.
We create an IEnumerator called DecayTripleShotTime that allows us to define a timeframe for how long we want the Triple Shot ability to be on. We’ll create a private instance variable for the timeframe and call it _tripleShotDuration.
Now, when we turn on the Triple Shot ability, we also call our coroutine. Once the allotted time passes, we reset our boolean _canTripleShot to be false and wait for the next time a player collects the Triple Shot powerup to turn on the ability. Pretty cool!
