Up to this point, the hit detection on the enemies has been very basic. Essentially, on collision, a hit point is removed from the enemy and when the enemy's life hits zero, it's destroyed. Considering I want different weapons that do different damage with possible different effects, I need something a bit more beefy.

The solution turned out to be quite simple: Harvest some scripts from the Dual Stick Shooter (DSS) prototype that NoStyleGuy and I were working on last year. I'm now reusing a couple Hit and Round interfaces defined in DSS to accomplish exactly what I want. I also ported over the EffectsManager from DSS to decouple all of my hit, death, etc. effects from my objects.

Sadly, since Unity doesn't have a concept of Nested Prefabs, and since all of my enemies need to be baked into the level segments they live in, I needed to spend a decent chunk of time updating every instance of my enemies by hand rather than being able to change a single enemy prefab to make this update. I'm going to have to come up with an easier scheme to update/tweak these values moving forward. But, oh well. For now, brute force got the job done.

On the positive side, the ease in which I was able to reuse some of the DSS code makes me smile. It shows that, while DSS might be on hold (or dead) we made a lot of useful (and reusable) thing that will continue to pay dividends in future endeavors.