Implementing the Spawn System

 Author: Christopher Solomon

    One of the systems that I implemented this past week is the spawn system. Prior to its implementation, nothing would happen if the player ran out of HP. I worked to make sure that the player would die if they lost their HP and then be respawned a few seconds later. There were a few issues I had to solve to get the system working however. One such thing was that the player could enter build mode after they died during the respawning period. I solved this problem by disabling input from the player controller after death and restored input after they respawned. Another problem that occurred was that sometimes the player would not respawn if their respawn point was colliding with another object. I fixed this by making sure that the player's position will be shifted but they will always respawn in such cases.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 Implementing A Flyweight System in Blueprints The Problem: How to Properly Implement? The first task was to figure out what types of tools were at my disposal to make a flyweight system in Unreal using blueprints. I was very lost when starting out, so I started with how I would make such a pattern in C++. This would include making a custom static structure that would be shared between all instances of the tower class. Furthermore, at each child, I could derive a custom flyweight object for each type. First, I looked into whether Blueprints supported static variables and unfortunately, I didn't find a satisfying answer there.  My next idea was to find a blueprint that would persist throughout the entire level and simply jam all those tower values in there. This definitely wasn't an "elegant" solution, and it had additional potential problems as well. Each tower would need to be added to this central blueprint and custom functions to retrieve their specific data would ...
Read more

Working With Data Assets

Image
  Author: Christopher Solomon     For this week of our capstone project, my main priority was to implement the remaining tower upgrades that were not yet in the game. Last week I was able to implement around half of them so I was determined to finish up the other half in time for our build. Thankfully I succeeded but it was not without headaches.     The main problem I encountered this week had to do with the data assets we use for our towers' attributes. These data assets contain such as the tower's health and how much damage they do to enemies, among other things. All instances of a certain tower share the same data asset, which makes implementing the upgrades more convenient. The first issue I came across was that the utility towers did not have their own data assets yet, only the attack towers did. I was sure to create new ones to better support our upgrade system. Another issue I ran across was that the updated values in the data asset were persistent even ...
Read more

Creating Game Icons Using AI

Image
 The Problem A good, polished game needs art! Prototype assets can only get you so far before it's time to implement assets that will really draw players in. Unfortunately, I am not artistically inclined in the slightest. Stick figures are usually my go-to. However, stick figures aren't going to cut it. One of the big art hurdles we ran into was to do with icons for our towers/upgrades. These are relatively specific pieces that are hard to fulfill with good  free , available art. Instead, I set out to find a way to make our own art look good.   The Solution This is where AI has come to the rescue! I had done some research about certain machine learning ventures that are trained to make pictures from text prompts as well as from a reference image. After several hours of messing around with a program called Stable Diffusion and looking up some other videos on people's workflow utilizing the program, I finally came up with my own workflow which produced decent results!...
Read more