That's great! Thanks very much.

I'm sure this is embarrassingly obvious but I can't work out how to check if the player has typed a particular word (like in a spelling game). Do I have to do it key by key? I'd like to have a large selection of words that can be randomly displayed one by one on the screen and the player then has to type them within a time limit.

All advice greatly appreciated.

It's okay - I figured it out! I just set a variable to player.angle when the key was pressed then had the facing set to that variable while the key was held down.

I'm sure I must be overlooking a simple way of doing this. I'm making a top-down shooter with 8-way movement but I'd like for the player to be able to use a particular key to lock the facing. In other words, when they are holding down that key they will still be able to move as normal but their facing will be locked at the angle it was when they pressed the key, effectively strafing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Perfect! That worked just right. Many thanks

Another real beginner's question...

I'm trying to arrange it so that when a player is hit by a bullet his death animation plays but it's driving me mad because it only ever plays the first frame. I have it set so that on collision with the bullet, the bullet will be destroyed, the controls disabled and the player's animation set to 'death' (a sequence of five frames) but only the first frame of this animation ever plays.

What could I be doing wrong?

Thanks so much! I feel a bit silly now for failing to see that - I actually used a similar timer for something else yesterday...

These forums are great for a beginner like me. I really appreciate such helpful and prompt feedback.

I'm making a very simple arm-wrestling minigame as part of something larger and I've got it working fairly well. It's just a case of speed-tapping the space bar to win. The opponents score increases all the time but I'd like for it to increase much faster if the space bar hasn't been touched for a couple of seconds. What the simplest way of doing this (essentially, detecting that a key hasn't been pressed for x amount of time)?

Thank you both! That's exactly what I needed to know.

This is a real beginner's question, I think...

How do I exclude a number from being randomly generated? Essentially, I want to save the last number generated as a variable then exclude it from the next pick so the same number is never picked twice in a row.

Thank you!

I think this must be very easy and I'm just overlooking the answer. I'd like to set the game to begin when the space bar is pressed and I would ideally like the game time to be reset at that point so that events scheduled to begin after so many seconds are timed according to when the space bar was pressed, not when the whole game started. Do I need to set my own timer for this, and if so then what is the easiest way to do so?

Many thanks.