I added a life system using pfscore1. Currently it doesn’t really do much, but I’ve set up the movement so that a collision with the playfield (based on the ball, which is in the center of the player sprite and rendered in the layer below so it’s not visible) causes the playfield to turn red and the player loses one life of three.

A bit it set to ensure that the player doesn’t continually lose lives. This means that a player could “abuse” the system by hanging on a wall to memorize the layout of a screen, but since that knowledge will only help them until they’ve gotten to the edge of the screen, I don’t consider it a problem. If the player really wants to make that sacrifice, why not?

I got around the loss of missile0 by having player 1 (the second player) be the player that is actually being controlled. This should work fine, since there will only be a single enemy on screen a a time, and it can just as well be player0 as it could have been player1, but since the enemy won’t have any attack, there’s no real cost in losing missile0. Thinking outside the box.