Enemy Health Bars and Bug fixing

Anthony Palermo - 3/10/2023

I spent the large majority of this week working on fixing some major bugs related to the menus and skill trees. In addition, I worked on a health bar for the enemies in our game. I am uncertain if we intend for that to remain for our final build, but it is a helpful tool for us when it comes to debugging and identifying if enemies are taking damage. Along with all that, I have come close to finalizing the lich skill tree, the only things left to do is the actual functional coding and artwork.

The enemy health bars were pretty simple to implement, but I had a problem occur with them that was problematic for our game specifically. I was able to quickly make a UI element to show how much health an enemy had. I then coded it to update regularly and be set when the enemy is created. The issue that popped up was that the possession blip, which is a small green sphere that appears over an enemy when their health is below a certain amount, would never appear. The problem occurred because I was overwriting the tick event that was in the base class that all enemies share with a new tick event.

In terms of bugs I have spent time working on, they primarily had to do with the UI and menus. As mentioned above, the possession indicator not appearing was a bug that I also fixed. I had while working, thought there was a bug that was causing the settings to not be saved between the main menu and the pause menu options. I was able to identify that this is not the case, and what is actually happening is that the settings in the option menu do not correctly show what the actual setting are.

The largest bug that I needed to solve was making it so the player could pause the game when they were possessing an enemy. The reason this bug was happening was due to when the player possesses an enemy, the controller now takes over that enemy and the opening of the pause menu was tied to specifically the slime character. So, whenever the player controller was no longer the slime, the player could not pause the game. I was able to fix this issue by using a reference to the player slime, which most of the enemies already had, and calling a function to pause the game through the slime.