Throughout the Basic Coding courses, you have scripted individual parts to create playable scenes. With the previous method, if you were to duplicate the parts you would then also have duplicate scripts. This would make updating the scripts tedious as changes would have to be done script by script.

In this course, a different pattern will be used to create a number of health pickups, with only a single copy of the script which determines the health pickup behaviour. When the pickup is touched, it will restore the player’s health, fade slightly and be disabled for a short period of time.

Setting Up

First up, you’ll need a part or a model to use as a pickup. The Showdown Town example world includes plenty of health pickups spread all over the map - you can open it in Studio by clicking Edit as shown.

Each health pickup is a Union of two rectangular parts with a green PointLight inside. They’re all stored in one folder in the Workspace called HealthPickups, which is where the script will look for them. If you add any more to the map, it’s essential you ensure that they are also stored in this folder.

Restoring Health

To begin with, the script needs to restore a player’s health. This pattern should be familiar to you from the Deadly Lava course.

1. In ServerScriptService, add a script called PickupManager.

2. In this script, declare a constant called MAX_HEALTH with the value 100.

3. Create a function called onTouchHealthPickup with parameters for the other part that touched the pickup and the pickup itself.

   local MAX_HEALTH = 100
   
   local function onTouchHealthPickup(otherPart, healthPickup)
   
   end

4. In the function, get the character model from the parent of otherPart. Next, check to see if it has a Humanoid using Instance/FindFirstChildWhichIsA|FindFirstChildWhichIsA.

5. If it has a humanoid, set their Health property to MAX_HEALTH.

   local MAX_HEALTH = 100
   
   local function onTouchHealthPickup(otherPart, healthPickup)
       local character = otherPart.Parent
       local humanoid = character:FindFirstChildWhichIsA("Humanoid")
       if humanoid then
       	humanoid.Health = MAX_HEALTH
       end
   end

Getting the Pickups Folder

The folder holding the health pickups may not have loaded into the game by the time the script runs. WaitForChild can be used to pause the script and get the HealthPickups folder when it loads.

When called on a folder, the GetChildren function will return an array of the folder’s contents.

1. Beneath MAX_HEALTH, declare a variable called healthPickupsFolder and use the WaitForChild function to get the HealthPickups folder from the Workspace.

2. Create a variable named healthPickups to store the result of calling the GetChildren function on healthPickupsFolder.

   local MAX_HEALTH = 100
   
   local healthPickupsFolder = workspace:WaitForChild("HealthPickups")
   local healthPickups = healthPickupsFolder:GetChildren()
   
   local function onTouchHealthPickup(otherPart, healthPickup)
   local character = otherPart.Parent
   	local humanoid = character:FindFirstChildWhichIsA("Humanoid")
   	if humanoid then
   		humanoid.Health = MAX_HEALTH
   	end
   end