Modular Health System in Unity

The latest challenge in my current project is to create a modular health system for the player and enemies. It needs to be a script that can be attached players, characters or enemies in the game.

The basic requirements are simple:

• Create a script that can be attached to anything that can take damage.
• Have variables to store Max, Min and Current health.
• Create a damage method that can be accessed by whoever or whatever is causing the damage.
• Calculate the health of whoever is receiving the damage.
• Check to see if the characters health is below the minimum health value.
• Create a death method that destroys the current character.

The first requirement was easy. I created a C# script and named it Health.

Inside of the script, I created three variables to store the Max, Min and Current health of the character. I made the damage stats integers because I didn’t think that the character could take part of a health point as damage. I made Max and Min health easy to modify in the Inspector.

[SerializeField]
private int _maxHealth;
[SerializeField]
private int _minHealth;
private int _currentHealth;

The next step was to create a damage method that can be accessed by whoever or whatever is causing the damage. I created a public method named TakeDamage. This method receives a damage amount when it is called.

    public void TakeDamage(int damage)
    {
        _currentHealth -= damage;
        if(_currentHealth < _minHealth)
        {
            Die();
        }
    }

This method also meets the next two requirements which were calculate health and check for death.

The final requirement was to create a method for the character to die. I could have put it in the TakeDamage method, but I thought that down the road that I would probably want to get fancy and add in a death animation and possible some kind of particle effect. I created a method named Die.

    public void Die()
    {
        Destroy(this.gameObject);
    }

The few lines of code in this script are a solid beginning to a universal health system that can easily be attached to anything that takes damage and can die or be destroyed.

Here is the complete script.

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class Health : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField]
    private int _maxHealth;
    [SerializeField]
    private int _minHealth;
    private int _currentHealth;

    void Start()
    {
        _currentHealth = _maxHealth;
    }

    void Update()
    {
        
    }

    public void TakeDamage(int damage)
    {
        _currentHealth -= damage;
        if(_currentHealth < _minHealth)
        {
            Die();
        }
    }

    public void Die()
    {
        Destroy(this.gameObject);
    }
}