Dev Log 8

This week, I focused on implementing checkpoints into the game to improve the overall player experience. Before adding them, if a player fell or failed a section, they had to restart from the very beginning, which quickly became frustrating. To fix this, I decided to add checkpoints at key points in the level to create a better balance between challenge and progression.

The creation of checkpoints was simple, changed my respawn code to use the checkpoints position, added sound, explored the idea of adding in a static mesh or leaving it blank. After some testing, I decided to remove the static mesh and instead display text to indicate when a checkpoint has been reached. This kept the design cleaner and reduced visual clutter.

One of the first challenges I faced was that the character wasn't registering the checkpoint the text would display but then once the player died they would restart at the beginning which is not how they are supposed to work. When looking through my code that was used to create the checkpoint I found that nowhere in my player blueprint had I mentioned to get the new spawn position. I knew that this would be the problem as if there is no reference to the new transform the player will not know where to go and default back to the start. For this in my respawn section that I had previously made I needed to add the custom event that I had made in the game mode blueprint so that the player had a reference to the respawn code. Once I added this to the end of the respawn code in my player blueprint and test ran the game the checkpoints were working as they were supposed to.

I then faced the challenge of ensuring that the checkpoints registered properly without causing any bugs. At first, I noticed that some checkpoints weren’t saving the correct position, causing the player to respawn in the wrong location. I fixed this by refining the way positions were stored and tested multiple scenarios to ensure accuracy.

My next step was to balance the checkpoints placement. If they were too frequent, the level felt too easy, but if they were too sparse, the difficulty became frustrating. Through playtesting, I adjusted their locations to keep a good flow.

My final outcome of how the checkpoints worked and looked I was happy with as the balance of how many there are allowed you to run through the game and enjoy it instead of having checkpoints that were really far away from were they got up too.