Player Health, UI and Fall Damage

It’s time to add some danger to the game. As of yet, there are currently no danger elements so the first one I will be implementing will be fall damage. To go along with this, I’ll be updating the UI to add the health, cash and depths displays, as well as preparing it for the upcoming stamina feature.

One thing I’ve learnt over the course of creating this game is that centralisation is a key part of programming -it’s important to keep code in a logical order. With that in mind, I proceeded to handle all damage from the PlayerController script and any incoming damage information would be passed to a function called DamagePlayer (float damageToGive, string damageType). The variables in the brackets are called ‘overloads’. This means that whenever this function is called, it will require that this data is passed to the function. In this instance, I’m passing the amount of damage and the type of damage respectively. With this in place, I could now proceed to developing the fall damage mechanic.

Fall damage is seen in many games. A good example of a fall damage system is from the game Minecraft, where falling from a certain number of blocks in height will result in base fall damage. Falling from any block after the threshold height results in a fixed amount of damage, based on an algorithm. For my game, I won’t include any complex algorithms as that’s not necessary. What I’m looking for is a system which, if falling from a height greater than or equal to 5 units, will result in fall damage equal to (fall distance * fall damage multiplier (1.5)). i.e. falling from a height of 5 will result in 7.5 fall damage. Once the damage has been calculated, it’s then passed through to damagePlayer, which for now, outputs that damage in a Debug.Log.

Implementing fall damage was tough, as I had to come up with a way to calculate the falling damage based on where the Player started and ended. The challenge came when I figured that I needed to update the Player’s current position only when they were on the ground. I achieved this by using a ray cast which fired downwards from the centre of the Player, and whenever a collision is detected, it triggers a bool on the Player to true (isGrounded). I chose to use a ray cast after first attempting to use the box collider to detect collisions using the OnTriggerEnter, OnTriggerStay and OnTriggerExit functions. However, this led to problems where the Player was able to collide with the side of objects, which would set isGrounded to true, therefore nullifying the damage completely if they exploited this. Basically, whenever the Player is standing on an object that’s considered to be ground, the Player’s position is updated to a variable called lastPositionY. Once the Player starts falling, lastPositionY stops getting updated while the player’s current y position is changing. Upon hitting the ground, the function takes the lastpositionY and subtracts that from the player’s current Y position, thus giving me the fall distance. This system gave me the opportunity to use and understand ‘getters and setters’.