Who doesn’t want to Power-Up

Yiu Chu
2 min readMay 18, 2021

It is no secret players love to get powered up in a game. In Shoot-em-up games, for example, this will mean more powerful shot, speed boost, temporary shield, super missiles and any crazier weapons/movement you can think of.

Activating powerup

Powerups are usually activated temporarily when players collect or collide with some sort of powerup game objects

Shot powerup:

Now add a speed boost powerup:

And the one below is my favorite Protective Shield power-up:

As you can see, adding power-up one at a time is straight forward. It is only limited by your imagination and design. It is worth noting, however, that game logic can become complicated if

  • different powerups can be activated and combined at the same time.
  • each type of power-up can have further level-up, for example, collecting speed-boost multiple times can let the player move faster and faster.
  • To avoid too many or too few power-up on the screen, additional logic may also be needed.
  • Some power-up could be too powerful and the game can only spawn them under some special conditions.

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Yiu Chu

A senior software engineer determined to be one of the industry's best Unity developer in 2D, 3D and VR