How to create a Hitbox and Hurtbox collision interaction

[BigBoy_Fargo]

Godot Version

v4.2.1

Question

In my game, the player is a zombie trying to infect a certain number of humans, so when they Attack an npc they will become a zombie and then increase the “score” or Zombie Count until they reach the goal and win the game. I have hitboxes for the attacks and hurtboxes for the NPCs, and I have some code set up to perform a function when they connect but I’m not getting the debug message showing that the attack connects. Any advice on troubleshooting this or finding a solution?
Additionally, if there is any advice on organizing the code based on the examples given, I’ll happily take that too! If there are any further questions of what my code is like or if more code examples are needed, please let me know.

(Example of how picking the facing sprite works, has all four directions with animState going from 0 to 3)
if Input.is_action_pressed("ui_down"):
	_animated_sprite.play("face_down")
	animState = 2


(Example of picking the attack sprite)
if animState == 2:
	_animated_sprite.play("attack_down")
	print("Attacked downward")
			
			
(Example of hitbox collision producing this outcome)
func _on_attack_down_hitbox_area_entered(area):
	if area.is_in_group("hurtbox"):
		print("Down attack connects!")
		area.become_zombie()
		#Need to make "hurtbox" for NPCs
		#Need to make become_zombie()
		print("Down attack connects!")

`

[Ryan_Flynn]

It’s hard to tell without more info on your scene setup, but here are some common issues:

• If the hitbox is actually a PhysicsBody2D (rather than an area), then you need to use the _on_attack_down_hitbox_body_entered(body) handler
• Is the hitbox always part of the player scene, or do you instantiate it when the player attacks? In the latter case, make sure you’re actually calling add_child on the hitbox
• Is the hurtbox the same Node as the enemy, or does the enemy contain a hurtbox as a child? Does anything happen, for example, if you comment out the if area.is_in_group("hurtbox") line?

Happy to look into this more, but without more info it’s just a guessing game from my end.

[paintsimmon]

Ryan is right, we need more information to help. But I made this list of common collision issues so maybe you can take a look and see if your issue is on this list.

Collision Not Working Checklist

Collision Not Working Checklist There’s a lot of ways that collision might not work as expected. Here are some reasons I’ve found. They are somewhat sorted in order of how likely I think they are to occur. None of these reasons are specific to 2D or 3D. General Checklist You are running the wrong scene. The Run Project (F5, the play button on the left of the other buttons) button only runs the main scene, which might not be the same thing as the scene you currently have open. Run Current Scen…

[BigBoy_Fargo]

Here’s how the scene looks relating to the hitboxes and hurtboxes.

For the player the relationship is AnimatedSprite 2D > Area2D > CollisionShape2D. For npcs, it’s CharacterBody2D > Area2D > CollisionShape2D. Everything is currently under Collision Layer 1 and Collision Mask 1.
After commenting out the if statement on one of the functions like Ryan suggested, I immediately got the message printed “Left attack connects!” as soon as I ran the program. So I guess that means immediately detecting an area entered.
If I need to show anything else, let me know!

[paintsimmon]

It doesn’t appear that any of the hurtboxes are in a group. A square symbol would appear next to the node in the Scene docker if it were.