Can't update score text - small error breaks the game (Space Shooter Tutorial)

Questions & Answers
1

I’m at the final stages of the tutorial, but now that I’ve tried to add the Score Text to work, I’ve been getting the following error:

NullReferenceException: Object
reference not set to an instance of an
object GameController.UpdateScore ()
(at
Assets/Scripts/GameController.cs:49)
GameController.Start () (at
Assets/Scripts/GameController.cs:21)

I checked in the Inspector, and the scoreText seems appropriately assigned, but when I start playing the game, it gets switched to “None”.

This is my code. What am I missing?

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using UnityEngine.UI;

public class GameController : MonoBehaviour {

    public GameObject asteroid;
    public int hazardCount; // Number of hazards per wave

    public float startWait;
    public float spawnWait;
    public float waveWait;

    private int score;
    public Text scoreText;

    void Start()
    {
        scoreText = GetComponent<Text>();
        score = 0;
        UpdateScore();
    }
    
    public void AddScore(int x)
    {
        score += x;
        UpdateScore();
    }

    void UpdateScore()
    {
        scoreText.text = "Score: " + score;
    }
}
2

This line scoreText = GetComponent<Text>(); Tries to find the component Text on the same GameObject the script is attached to. If it doesn’t find one suitable component, it returns null. That’s why your scoreText reference null, when you start the game. Just leave the line out and everything should work fine.

From Unity Scritpting API: GetComponent

Returns the component of Type type if
the game object has one attached, null
if it doesn’t.