Scene / script structure for enemies of different node types?

Help Programming
1

Godot Version

4.4.1

Question

I’m quite new on my Godot journey and a little confused as to the best approach to use for the following…

In my game my ‘enemies’ will be a mixture of PhysicBodies2D (Static, Rigid and Character). I’d like to create some kind of ‘base_enemy’ scene / script for all the come properties (health, loot_drop, contact_damage…) and functions (take_damage, line_of_sight_to_player…)

If my enemies were all, for example, RigidBody2D’s I would create a base scene with that as a root and then use ‘New inherited scene’. But I don’t think that will work in my case as I’ve got different root node types?

At the moment I’ve got a autoload script for the common functions, but that feels pretty clunky.

Just wondering what options I’ve got for approaching this?

2

Is the main reason you want to do this so you can re-use code? If so, here’s an alternative to using inheritance.

Consider making lots of tiny component nodes that all serve one particular function. For example, a HealthComponent that tracks the player’s health, and a DropLootComponent that governs if an enemy drops something if defeated, and if so, what. If you have a number of these components then you can mix and match when making a new enemy by including certain components but not others.

Example scripts (incomplete, they just serve as inspiration):

#HealthComponent
class_name HealthComponent extends Node

signal defeated

@export var health : int = 10

func take_damage(amount : int)->void:
    health -= amount
    if health <= 0:
        defeated.emit()

#DropLootComponent
class_name DropLootComponent extends Node

@export var item : SomeEnumClass.ITEM_LIST = SomeEnumClass.ITEM_LIST.CRAB_LEGS
@export var drop_chance : int = 10

func drop()->void:
    if randi # Drop logic goes here

By adding these scenes to any enemy scene, you can now tie them together via the top level script:

# Some enemy class

@export var health_component : HealthComponent = null #Set via inspector
@export var drop_loot_component : DropLootComponent = null # Same

func _ready()->void:
    if health_component != null:
        health_component.defeated.connect(_on_defeated.bind())


func _on_defeated()->void:
    if drop_loot_component != null:
        drop_loot_component.drop()
1 Like
3

Wow, didn’t know you could do this. So you’re storing a class / script in a variable and then you can access anything in that script directly. Pretty neat.

1 Like
4

Broadly speaking, yes. But you can only add nodes that are present in the current scene.