Building Games in Flash 5 - Part 3 - Enemies and collisions - Page 2

Step 1: Creating something to fire at!

First we are going to create some enemy spaceships to fire at.

Open up the source file from the end of tutorial 2.

On the main Timeline create a new layer and call it enemy.
On this new layer draw an enemy spaceship. Select the enemy spaceship, choose Insert and Convert to Symbol (or F8) and make your enemy a movie clip.

Select this enemy movie clip and in the Instance panel set the movie clips name to enemy1 (as shown below).

If you don't want to draw the enemy spaceship you can download this fla in the downloadable zip file, with this step already done for you.

The enemy spaceships:

Our game is going to follow a typical space shooting game structure. The enemy spaceships are going to move across the stage from right to left. The player will need to either dodge or shoot the enemies. If the player shoots an enemy it will explode. If an enemy collides with the player the game will be over.
We will use duplicateMovieCip to create multiple enemy ships.

Random start locations

Our enemies are going to start just to the right of the screen and move left. However if all the enemies started at the same location the game would be very easy and boring. We need to introduce a random element to the game. So all the enemy spaceships will start at the same x-position (to the right of the stage) but will each have a random y-position.

We will also make the enemy speed random, to add an extra challenge to the game.