I threw together this example project in Unity to serve as our base game. The object of the game is to aim the laser to blast away enemies before they reach you. When adding visual polish to this project, we are going to focus on the main interactions of the game, instead of art, environment, or atmosphere. This style of polish is often described as making the game “juicy” or improving the “game feel.”

Enemy Health

In the game, the laser takes some time to destroy the enemies. They actually have an invisible HP number in code that is counting down to zero before they are destroyed. We are going to try to communicate this system more clearly to the player by representing the enemy HP visually. A common go-to in games is displaying a health bar for the enemies. We will go with a more integrated (and simpler) approach.