How We Stopped Our Game from Crashing

The Problem

You know that moment when you hit “Play” in Unreal, everything’s going great… and then boom — instant crash? That was my week.

While hooking up our HUD, weapon, and animation systems in Wave Breakers, I discovered that some of our event bindings in BeginPlay() were a little too trusting. We were binding delegates to objects that sometimes didn’t exist yet — like WeaponObject, PlayerHUD, or AnimationObject. And in Unreal, calling a function on a null reference is basically asking the game to self‑destruct.

For a player, this would mean mid‑match crashes, lost progress, and a very bad first impression. For us, it meant milestone instability — and that’s a no‑go.

 Screenshot of the crash log or Unreal’s “Fatal Error” screen. Caption: “The dreaded text of doom.”

The Solution

Instead of relying on “hope” as a coding strategy, I rewrote our BeginPlay() logic in both ABasePlayer and ABaseCharacter to be more defensive:

• Null checks before binding — If WeaponObject or PlayerHUD isn’t valid, we skip the binding and log a clear warning.
• Removed brute‑force destruction — We had K2_DestroyActor() calls as a fallback, but that was overkill and could cause other systems to break. Now we fail gracefully.
• Clear logging — Every skipped binding now tells us exactly why it was skipped, so future debugging is painless.
• Signature safety — Made sure delegate signatures match exactly, so no more runtime mismatches.

After the fix, I tested the build by spawning in different maps, swapping weapons, and triggering animations — no crashes. The HUD updates ammo and health in real time, animations fire correctly, and the game stays stable.

For the player, this means uninterrupted gameplay. For the team, it means we can confidently build on top of this system without worrying about hidden landmines.

Next Steps

Now that the foundation is stable, I’ll be helping the team integrate more features without fear of breaking the build. Stability first, features second — that’s how we keep Wave Breakers fun and functional.

Next up, I’ll be diving into our AI systems — refining enemy pathfinding, behavior trees, and animation triggers to make sure our NPCs feel reactive and challenging. With the core systems now solid, it’s the perfect time to start building smarter, more dynamic encounters.