Last week I was tasked with building a puzzle for our game. Not being a level designer by any means, this task took a bit of time to complete, as I wanted to make something simple enough to be a good starter puzzle for a character with no power ups, but also interesting enough so the player wouldn’t find it boring. After a good bit of planning and messing around with (and bug fixing) geometry, I did manage to complete a simple but fun puzzle that I was satisfied with, complete with a spinning floor platform with fan blades that tried to keep the player from reaching the power-up platform. Phew! But not all was smooth sailing…

When incorporating the puzzle into the build, we found an interesting bug… When the player swapped items in their inventory, the puzzle just…. completely vanished. Not only did it vanish, but it was the only thing that vanished from the level. Now, I found this to be very strange. Why did this happen? How come this happened when swapping inventory items? Why was it only the puzzle?! So many questions, so little answers…

One of the problems had to do with the puzzle itself. I had built the puzzle using custom geometry brushes, but when moving the puzzle around the map and trying to get it to fit, some of the geometry faces would vanish, and the player was able to fall right through. This was obviously a problem because the player wasn’t able to complete the puzzle, let alone get to the power up waiting for them near the end. In order to fix this, I had to combine all the static pieces and turn it into a static mesh. This caused problems with our inventory system which was set up to destroy static meshes within the level upon swapping items. The fix ended up being quite simple (albeit a bit of a band-aid), we added a tag that checked if something was labeled as a Level, and if it was not, it would be destroyed upon swapping items. We are going to implement a better fix for this in the future, but for now, crisis averted!