Author: Austin Pereira

3/22/2024

Instant Kill Powerup

Surprisingly, the instant kill power up, or Death Touch as we called it, was the hardest and longest powerup to implement. Initial implementation was to either modify the player's equipped weapons or to set every zombie's HP to 0.1. The issue with these solutions was that the weapon modification wouldn't work with the system we have and there wouldn't be a way to set every new zombie's HP to 0.1 during the instant kill powerup being active. We eventually decided on going through the Base Zombie AI class, where the Zombie death was being kept tracked. This implementation worked but led to the main issue, where the timer wouldn't turn off the instant kill powerup, leading to an infinite use. This couldn't stay otherwise the game would become very easy once a player got the instant kill powerup.

After some debugging, I discovered that in order to properly get the timer working correctly, it would have to be handled inside the Game Mode and the powerup call those methods. With the timer now in the Game Mode and not the powerup itself, the instant kill powerup now lasted a limited time instead of indefinitely. After making some changes to the instant kill blueprint and adding the powerup to the potential drop all was working as intended. This marked the third of five planned powerups successfully implemented and added to the drop pool.