Damage VFX using Animated Sprites in Unity

For today’s article, I’ll be going over how I added damage Visual Effects onto the ship’s engines using Unity’s Animation system.

Setting up the Player Game Object

In the Player game object within the Hierarchy window, I placed 2 child game objects named Left_Engine and Right_Engine. Each engine has the following components attached:

Next, I dragged and dropped all the animation frames for when one of the engines from the player’s ship gets damaged onto the Animation dope sheet window. Here, I made sure that the engine game object in the hierarchy is selected and that an animation file is created to store the animation frames for the damage VFX:

Lastly, I disabled the engine game objects so that they do not appear on the ship when we first play the game:

Adding Engines into the Player Script

The behavior I wanted to achieve when the Player Ship gets damaged is to pick a random side to enable one of the damaged engine VFX. I achieve this by implementing the following below inside of the Damage() function:

Don’t forget to add the engines in the Player Script!

Final Result

Thanks for reading :)