Creating a Homing Missile Projectile
With more Power comes more responsibility… Unless you have a Homing Missile, then you can just let it do it’s thing!
Probably one of the most Powerful Projectiles known to the Game-verse, Homing Missiles are a staple in locking down those pesky Enemies that are just too far away or in odd positions.
Let’s make one!
Creating the Pickup
First thing’s first, we need a Pickup to activate the new Projectile type!
I am using the same Ammunition pack used previously to create the Ammo pickup — it’s a free pack in the Unity store!
I just duplicated 3 large bullets to create the pickup:
And attached a Rigidbody 2D (gravity scale = 0), and a BoxCollider 2D (Is Trigger).
Then attached the Powerup script, and set it’s ID to 6:
Within the Powerup script, I updated the switch statement to accept our new Powerup:
In the Player Script
Updating the Player script doesn’t require much, but it starts with creating new variables:
And the creation of some new functions:
Then update our Firing logic to fire our Missile when our bool is active:
The Homing Missile
Now we need to create our Homing Missile so that we can link the Prefab to the Player script and properly fire it!
I just used a single bullet from the same ammunition as the Pickup, and added a Player thruster sprite to it to create the Missile aesthetic:
Then added our Rigidbody 2D and BoxCollider 2D, and created a HomingMissile script (lol, yes I know I spelled ‘Missle’ wrong in the script… I didn’t notice until after everything was done. Whoops!)
HomingMissile script
To start off like any other script, we’ll need some variables to work with:
Then we’ll need to determine our Closest Enemy that we want to track down. This is done by getting an array of the _activeEnemies in the Scene and cycling through to see which one is closest:
And we’ll call this function as soon as our Homing Missile is instantiated; in the Start() function:
But now we need to utilize this new _target. So we’ll create a MoveToTarget() function:
And also create a BoundCheck() incase our Missile goes haywire:
Then check these two functions within Update():
Enemy Interaction
The last thing we need to do is determine what happens when the Homing Missile finally reaches it’s target.
So we’ll create a separate tag for the Missile:
And inside the Enemy script, inside the OnTriggerEnter2D logic, we’ll add some code to destroy things when hitting an object with the Tag “Missle” (oh man, how I HATE spelling mistakes. But sometimes, you gotta laugh at yourself. Sometimes when coding you get streamlined and forget about the small things. Let it be a lesson to all of us! SPELL CHECK :P) :
BOOM! You now have a fancy Enemy-tracking Missile that all your Enemies should fear!
Our game is almost complete… But we have one last thing to implement to make it really feel finished: a Boss enemy! In the next few articles we’ll be covering the creation of a big bad boss!
