Hi there.
You can give an image a transparent background in Photoshop or Gimp. Save it as a .png file and it will retain the alpha layer when you load it into Blender. When you UV-map the image to your plane, you then need to set the face to Alpha mode. Make sure you’re in Edit Mode, then in the Editing window (F9), click the Texture Face panel, and click Alpha.
Scoring is done with an integer property. Simple. The hard part is displaying that property’s value in the game. You need to search for a game text tutorial if you don’t already know how to use text in the game engine. Once the text plane is created, make the “Text” property an integer. Then setup the logic to add to this number. Something like when the goal senses property “soccer ball”, send message “Player 1 score”, and when the text plane receives that message, add 1 to property “Text”. I can explain that better if you don’t get it.
The bricks that make up the Great Wall of Blender! Logic bricks are extremely useful for simple things like this. Keyboard sensor for up arrow (true pulse mode), connected to AND controller, connected to your actuator. Which actuator do you use? You have a few options. If you’re character is made up of shapes parented to eachother and you just moved them around for the animation, you need an ipo actuator. If you used an armature to animate it, you need an action actuator. In either case, set the start and end frame of the animation in the actuator, and set to loop stop, where it will keep playing as long as you hold the key. Another method that I recently adopted, is using property actuators to change an integer property through the animation frames, then have another line of logic bricks starting with an Always sensor set to play the action or ipo by property, rather than loop. This gives you greater control. For instance… if you’re making an rpg, and you want the players footspeed to increase over time, have a slow walk cycle to start out with, and then just increase the rate that the property changes, so that you’re playing the same animation faster, instead of recording several animations of varying speeds. I suggest you don’t use this last method if you’re not comfortable with properties.
Technically, it’s Collision>End Object, but yes.
Glowing objects? There’s probably some special way to do it with GLSL, I don’t know. But you can fake a glow. Think back to the alpha-layered plane. Make a glow image, this time with a black background. It doesn’t have to be .png. When you map it to a plane, set it to Add instead of Alpha. This will “add” the color values as extra light, so the black will turn invisible.
Just let me know if I need to clear anything up for you. Later.