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Game Development vocabulary · Level Design

Trigger

Meaning in game development, with examples

/ˈtrɪɡər/nounCommon term

In game development, trigger means: An invisible area or condition in a level that starts an event when the player enters it or does something, such as opening a door, spawning enemies or playing a cutscene.

In Turkish: tetikleyici, trigger, tetikleme alanı

How it is used

Level designers place trigger volumes or trigger boxes and connect them to scripts. Also a verb: entering the room triggers the ambush. A classic bug is a trigger that fires twice or never fires at all.

Example sentences

  1. Put a trigger at the top of the stairs to start the boss music.

  2. The ambush triggers too early, before the player can see the enemies.

Common collocations

  • trigger volume
  • trigger box
  • fire a trigger
  • trigger an event
  • one-shot trigger
  • scriptA piece of code that controls how something in the game behaves, such as a door that opens, an enemy that patrols or a quest that starts, usually attached to objects in the engine.
  • spawnTo make a character, enemy or item appear in the game world, or to appear in it. A spawn point is the place where this happens.
  • cutsceneA short non-interactive scene in a game, like a piece of film, that tells part of the story, introduces a character or shows the result of the player's actions.
  • level designThe work of creating the spaces a game takes place in, such as maps, missions and stages, and deciding where players go, what they meet and how hard it is.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Level Design

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