Enemy Explosions when Destroyed — Part 2

In the last article we created the Enemy Explosion VFX and fixed up the Animator Controller.

In this article we’ll finish up the process by triggering the animation state through code when the Enemy is destroyed!

Full Functionality (almost). Spot the bug if you can!

Enemy code

The first thing we’ll do is create a reference to our Animator, and then Initialize it in the Start() function:

Reference and intialized

Now we’ll go to our OnTriggerEnter2D logic and call our Trigger right before our Enemy is destroyed.

We have to use String references for this, so either Copy and paste the name of your Trigger Parameter, or double check the spelling so it is EXACT.

_anim.SetTrigger() will turn on our trigger and will Transition from our Empty State to our Explosion State.

But this alone will cause a problem:

What happened to the explosion?!

Because our Enemy code calls the Trigger then immediately after it destroys itself, it doesn’t have time to complete the Animation before being destroyed.

We can do this by delaying our Destroy() function by a float amount of time.

First, we need to determine the amount of time the Animation lasts for… So we can click on the Animation in the Project window, and in the Inspector window it should tell us the exact length of the animation.

The length of our animation is 2.633 seconds.

Now we can co back to our Enemy Code and delay our Destroy() function by adding in a float value to it’s parameters:

Adding destruction delay.

Another funny bug

With our destroy delay fixed, we now can notice another bug:

That’s a fast explosion!

When our Enemy is destroyed, the explosion continues with the same speed. It looks a little funny to me, so we’ll change that by slowing down the Enemy once it has been hit:

Slowing down the Enemy Game Object when hit.

Now it looks and feels better! The Player isn’t constantly dodging explosions now!

I feel safer already!

And another bug!

You may like this ‘feature’, I however, do not. When our Player destroys an Enemy, they can still be damaged by the explosion.

Yes this makes sense for real life — ouch, fire is hot! — but in the scope of our game, it will make it very difficult for our Player to escape tense situations with multiple enemies coming at once.

So to fix this, we can destroy the collider of the Enemy when hit, so that the VFX is purely visual!

Destroying the Collider2D

This fixes our problem of being damaged after the Enemy explodes and we can call this bug settled!

And now, A moment of laughter:

I swear it looks good in the actual game.

So…… This GIF is from a few sections ahead when I fixed this Explosion Collider bug. I had applied some Post-Processing (which we’ll get to soon), and had not realized that it bumped my GIF file size to 132 MB ! Medium’s file size limit is 25MB… So I had to run it through a couple GIF compressors, haha.

Lesson learned to take File Size in to account now. Sorry if some future GIFS look like this. I will hopefully find a way to reduce the File Limit without sacrificing too much quality. Might just have to make them grayscale… Hmmmmmmm……………

Anyways, Enemies explode now! In the next article we’ll be creating an Asteroid that the Player must destroy to Start the Game! To give them a moment to prepare themselves.