DOT Particle Effect Not Working In Release Build | Tech Discussion

For this tech discussion I will explain a problem I had with a particle effect for a DOT (damage over time) object in Mythicism and how I solved it. 

To start I will explain how the DOT was set up to begin with. When a spell hits a character in our game, it delivers a curse by spawning an actor of the specified type and attaching it to the hit character. Once attached, the curse begins doing its damage over time. When enough time has passed, the actor deletes itself, ending the curse. Attached to the curse actor is a particle effect showing that the curse is active. So when the curse is spawned, the particle appears, and when the curse is destroyed, the particle disappears.

This setup worked perfectly in the editor, however once we made a shipping build and began playtesting, the particle effect would only appear sometimes. 

The solution I came up with was simple: since we were in the last stage of development I needed a quick fix. Since I knew we wouldn’t be adding any additional curses, I simply added the particle effect to the player and enemies and left it invisible. Then I modified the curses to simply toggle the visibility on and off and that did the trick.

Author: Reilly da Silva