I kind of see what you're doing but it's highly convoluted for showing some lives. I would do the following, use a global variable for lives as mentioned above. To relate it to the lives object on screen, put an instance variable for lives, and give them the values 1, 2 , 3 etc. Then you just need a couple events, when you get hit, subtract 1 from the lives global variable, and to display lives you say choose lives object where instance variable is greater than lives global variable, set invisible. So if your lives is 1, it will hide the jet for 2 and 3 etc.