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Next Steps

Congratulations, you have made a game with powerups and enemies! This would be a great time to publish your game and play it with your friends.

Summary of key concepts​

Everything in Easel, even a subroutine of executing code like a with block, is a component that lives and dies with its entity. Every component can be replaced.

This gives rise to two ways to create dynamic elements to your game:

  1. To create a short-lived effect, attach components to a short-lived entity.
  2. To create change, replace components over time with changing parameters. This is as simple as wrapping them in a repeating block of some kind (for example, a with block or a for loop).

Once you understand all the ways in which these two ideas can be applied, you will be able to create a wide variety of dynamic effects in your games.

Where to from here?​

There is so much more that you can do with Easel. You may want to start by reading the Key Concepts page, which lists the most important things you must know to make sense of Easel. You may also want to check out the Reference, which is a comprehensive list of all functions available in Easel. You can also explore the topics listed in the sidebar to learn more about all of Easel's features.

You may want to take some time to further explore the concepts you have just learned before moving on. Here are some suggestions additional features you could add to the current game:

  • Make the shield explode when it collides with something, destroying all nearby asteroids.
  • Give a player to multiple lives. If their ship gets destroyed, but they still have some extra lives, spawn a new ship for them so they can keep playing. Lives could be collected by picking up a powerup that looks like the ship icon. You could make the lives shared across all players, and if a living player collects a life powerup, the game would immediately respawn a dead player so they can return to the game.
  • Make the level of difficulty increase as the game goes on. As the level increases, the asteroids could move faster, and the aliens could spawn more frequently, Maybe you could introduce new kinds of aliens with different weapons or movement patterns in later levels.
  • Add a dangerous boss alien that only arrives infrequently and has some kind of superweapon. Maybe they have some kind of charging up animation before firing a powerful laser that destroys everything in its path. Maybe destroying the boss is how you unlock the next level.

You have now reached the end of this tutorial. We hope that this tutorial has unlocked your imagination and that this is the first of many games you will make with Easel.

If you have any feedback, questions, want to talk with other Easel creators, or want to hear about updates to Easel, please join our official Discord server.