Making a Mobile Bounce Game with Unity 3D and Playmaker - Adding a POWERUP

Beginner Game Design tutorial series creating a simple Bounce type game using Playmaker within Unity 3D. PART 13 - In this video, I'll add a POWERUP to the game. Absolutely NOCODE. Also make a skateboard game playlist: https://bit.ly/34m4SHT 👉🏼 To Sign up for email updates on my latest tutorial

This episode adds a power-up to the mobile bounce game: a sparkly blue orb that appears at random spots, awards five bonus points when the ball touches it, and announces itself with screen shake and an animated +5 floating up the screen. It's a compact lesson in making a pickup feel rewarding.

Step 1 — Build the power-up orb

Create an empty named Power Up containing a sphere scaled to about 0.5 — slightly smaller than the ball, so it's not trivially easy to grab (the collider size is your difficulty dial). Check Is Trigger on its collider. Give it a light blue material with blue emission, then add a child particle system: shape set to sphere, lifetime 0.05-0.2, speed 0.05-0.2, size 0.3-0.5 (all Random Between Two Constants), emission pushed to 200 for a sparkly halo, start color Random Between Two Colors (blue and white) with the alpha pulled down. Shrink the shape's radius so the sparkle hugs the orb.

Step 2 — Random placement loop

An FSM named Set Position on the Power Up object cycles forever: two Random Float actions roll an X between -2 and 2 and a Y between 0 and 5 into x position and y position variables, Set Position moves the orb there (once, not every frame), the orb is activated, and a Random Wait of 3 to 6 seconds passes before looping back. Adding a deactivate before each reposition means the orb also blinks out if nobody grabs it in time — present sometimes, absent others, which keeps it feeling like a bonus rather than a fixture.

Step 3 — Detect the hit and add score

A second FSM, Ball Hit, runs a Trigger Event on the power-up ball (specify the game object — the orb owns the trigger collider) listening for trigger enter against the ball tag. On contact it fires an add to score event into a state that does an Int Add of 5 to the global score variable, then deactivates the orb with Activate Game Object unchecked — deactivating rather than destroying, since the placement loop will bring it back.

Step 4 — Make it feel like an event

The game already has a camera-shake FSM with small, medium, and large presets, so the score state copies the existing Send Event By Name action and calls screen shake lrg. Then a new UI canvas named Power Up gets a TextMesh Pro "+5" — bold, 125 pt, tinted to match the orb's blue — positioned near the score.

Step 5 — Animate the UI

UI elements animate exactly like game objects: with the canvas selected, create a clip named power up in the Animation window, drop the sample rate to 12, hit record, and over about one second move the +5 text upward while keying its vertex color to fully transparent at the end — a rise-and-fade toward the score. The canvas stays deactivated by default; the score state activates it (alongside the shake), a Wait state of exactly 1 second lets the animation play, and a final state deactivates the canvas before returning to listening. Hit, shake, +5 drifts away, orb respawns somewhere new — a complete power-up loop.