Author: Austin Pereira

3/28/2024

Powerup UI

While working on the UI for the powerups, there have been a few complications that appeared during production.  While actually getting the UI to work as intended was simple to add it, the bugs that came who a bit of a nuisance. Initially, we had a problem where the icon would stay permanently, but that was solved by going through the player/game state. After we found another bug that persists even now, where the same icon can appear multiple times on the UI. This is a problem as there should only be one icon per powerup with the timer resetting, not multiple icons for the same powerup be active.

Some solutions have been tried to fix this issue, with varying success. One attempted solution was able to remove the image correctly by referencing the previous time that child was added, but the timer didn't get reset, causing a random icon still in use to be removed once the timer ended. Another solution we tried had the timer reset correctly if the icon was already active by promoting the timer to a variable and clearing and resetting that timer, but the icons were still being duplicated. There are other planned solutions that might work, such as using either Booleans or switch cases, but as of this blog post no attempt has been successful at fixing this bug.