Killing Plane

Author: Aiden Huber

The game did not yet have a failsafe for stepping off of the map, allowing them to fall infinitely should they step off the edge or clip through the floor (thankfully, not yet a problem). The primary sub-problem I faced with this was trying to figure out how to get access to the Player's current health with as little direct contact with the other classes as possible. The idea had been to make it so that once the player's collision capsule overlapped the plane, it would subtract the amount of remaining health. I spent quite some time trying to think of how to do this.

Ultimately, I realized I was overengineering it. Instead of making a class deriving directly from AActor in order to access the plane shape, I decided on making use of the already functional damage pickup. The damage pickup already did what I needed from the killing plane. I took time to decide on how to figure out the controller's current health but, again, realized I was overengineering it. Instead, I shaped the collision box how I wanted it, which extends far beyond the edges of the walkable plane to account for momentum, and just made the DamageAmount set to an overwhelming number. I haven't fully put aside the idea of using an exact number, but since the damage function already takes into account a negative number and clamps it to 0, which plays through the character's death.