Fixing Issues with the Packaged Game

I have spent a lot of time during the game project fixing bugs and various issues with the code, the biggest one was an issue with the packaged game. I first noticed this before we carried out our first playtest - I had packaged the game and began to play it when both players fell through the map as soon as they spawned in. This resulted in our game freezing and becoming unplayable.

Due to the game being unplayable once packaged due to this issue, I began looking into fixes - this was something that would be critical to the game if we couldn't find a solution before the end of the project. I sadly couldn't do this before the second playtest came around due to being busy with other mechanics, so we had no choice but to playtest our game in the viewport again.

I first looked into the collisions in our game to ensure that they were all set up correctly, I almost found a solution by setting Sweep to True in the Set World Location node as I knew that this activates collisions. Although this worked, it gave us another issue of spawning the players on the wrong side of the map; this seems like it would be easily fixable, however it provided lots more issues to fix with the barrier movement, scoring system, and shooting.

I eventually started looking into issues with 'target point', as these determine where the player spawns in the viewport; I mostly looked on Unreal forums and searched around to see if anyone had had issues with these. I then found a lot of people whose target points would not work correctly and the player would fall through the map in a stand-alone or packaged game. I found out that I would need to store the target point as its own separate blueprint, with a sphere and a direction (arrow component) connected to be able to work.

The code below shows how I was able to set this up:

The viewport shows how the target point is now set up.

You can now see in the World Outliner tab that the player start points have their own blueprints, rather than just being a target point on their own.

I then changed the code in the level blueprint, I swapped out the start point nodes for the new ones in the screenshot below ...

I then changed the target from 'arrow component' to 'root component'

I'm glad that I was able to fix this issue now before the project was due, as this is something which would stop us from packaging and releasing the game to itch.io, and also took a lot of researching and trial and error to fix.

Once I had found out what this issue was, it was a relatively easy fix and worked straight away; this was a relief for everyone in the group as it meant that our project could be packaged correctly and uploaded to itch.io. Although this took a lot of research and trial and error, it was worth it as we now have a working game.