Week 11

Death Do Us Part!

Marvel Punisher

 This week - I got assigned to handle the Death Conditions - which means dying from Turrets, Minions, Environment Effects or just jumping off ledges. It's pretty good as it is a busy week from other subjects.

 So the first thing I did was to figure out the different ways people are resetting the Game State (so when you "Gamve Over!" you had something to fall back on.

 I found that most people utilized an "Open Level" Node which pretty much loads up another map. The main concern I had (before testing it and also why I googled for more ways before trying it) was that Opening a Level was used for a player entering new Levels as well (such as Level 1 -> Level 2) which meant variables could be saved such as Gold.

But... after testing - this was found to be a near non-issue so I decided to press forward with it. And as to provide player feedback - a very basic GUI was designed for the Game Over Screen.

 It was super simple - if you died - press the Restart Game button to... Restart the Game! Nothing much to say.

 So, the only coding left was when the player died... At first I thought this HAD to be handled in the Level Blueprint -- if a player reach 0 health, change the game state. But as I began coding it - I quickly figured out a faster and perhaps more efficient way of coding it.

 It was an EXTREMELY simple -- if the Character itself is destroyed (not it's health equalled to 0), create the Widget. After all, if the Character is destroyed, the player can't do anything EXCEPT click on the widget.

This of course, needed me to do a little more tinkering in other scripts (making sure that when enemies attack the player, if the player had 0 health, destroy him instead etc.). But the Script compiled and functioned as planned.

However, when the Enemies killed me, I could only observe as they continued to drone on mindlessly towards the Nexus and I remembered an old game I played. It's Game Over Screen significantly slowed down time as the minions continued moving in the background. It made it feel like the enemies was slowly stampeding on your corpse and I thought it was a fantastic idea.

With that, Time Dilation was added, it made the game progress in an extremely slow pace which meant that the Game State was not truly halted (which didn't matter since the Character was dead).

The only thing I didn't manage to hook up doing the Game Over State was the Environmental Effect "Acid Rain" which Mickey was working on this Week. Aside from that - this week was more of a relaxed week with quick rapid coding (which I was quite thankful for).