Unit 2 — Stats & Pickups
Coins, health, potions: the game gets a nervous system. This unit switches the physics engine on for the first time — nothing in the project had a collider or a rigidbody before it — and along the way you discover that the movement you wrote in Unit 1 ignores physics completely. Then: the playtest ritual, the social skill that turns a build into a game.
Lessons
| ID | Title | What you build / learn |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Coins: Triggers, Tags & Your First Stat | your first pickup — and discovering where a stat should live |
| 2.2 | Spikes: Physics, Damage & Death | why your movement ignores walls, and choosing a method you can defend |
| 2.3 | Healing Pickups & the Max-Health Cap | greyboxing a prefab, creating a new tag, and the tools that bound a value |
| 2.4 | Prefabs, Spawning & Playtesting | Instantiate, the tuning loop, silent partner watching |
| 2.5 | Physics & Stats Studio: Catch Up and Tune | finishing the unit, and re-measuring movement now that a body does the work |
| 2.6 | Unit 2 Review + Second Playtest | two playtest sheets compared, and the three systems traced in your own code |
Concepts this unit owns
The singleton pattern (a manager everyone can reach), the trigger vs collision distinction, and the playtest ritual belong to this unit forever. CED: AAP-2 (abstraction: one manager, many callers), AAP-3 (variables store program state).
Reference docs in this unit
- Triggers vs Collisions — the complete annotated reference for the physics family