Devlog 2: Rafael Vargas: Live, Die, Repeat

Live, Die, Repeat

Author: Rafael Vargas

Posted on 09/20/2024

This week, I faced the challenges of creating a system that would respawn the player after falling to their doom, without having to restart the entire level.  Initially, the player would fall and remain stuck at the bottom of this pit, forcing us to use our god mode cheat to fly back to the top.  My first approach involved destroying the player actor, and spawning a new one, but this resulted in issues with the controls.  This led to a larger issue -in order to respawn the player graciously - I needed to do it from within our Wizard blueprint.  The source control program we are currently using "Perforce" allows only one person to check out a certain file at any given time.  The wizard blueprint was being worked on by my other teammates for ability systems, spells, controls, etc, which locked me out of editing.  The image below shows me being a hoarder with several files checked out, locking my team out from manipulating any of them.  This issue ran down to the wire, where I had minimal time to implement and test the feature before our 0.0.2 release.

You might be wondering how'd I manage to get this system working with minimal time.  It turns out, there are some pretty nifty features in Unreal, waiting and hiding in plain sight.  I found out there is a built-in Teleport function in the engine that provided a much simpler and effective solution to my issue.  By teleporting the player to the last valid checkpoint, I could ensure that they continued from the correct location without disrupting the player's controls or input settings.  This solved the core problem of respawning and allowing me to avoid the whole destroy-recreate a new character - which was originally causing the control issues.  The teleport function provided a more streamlined approach, ensured faster "respawning" time and overall smoother gameplay that was functional for the 0.0.2 release.  The video below highlights some of the concepts of the respawn mechanic.