What to do when your player dies?

Hi, Im currently making a top down shooter. I'm curious to know how to handle my player dying. Basically, I don't think I want to destroy my gameObject, or just teleport them to some spawn location immediately, Or teleport them at all. Instead I think it would be better to have a spectator mode of sorts. Is there a way to disable components like collider2D and rigidbody2D so that my player becomes uninteractable by other players. Similar to how AmongUs handles dead players. Im not looking for specific scripting solutions, just what would be common practice in these scenarios?

 

Yes you could run a function (assuming that the player has just one rigidbody/collider)

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.  
3. public class PlayerDied : MonoBehaviour
4.     {
5.          public bool isPlayerDead;
6.  
7.          private gameObject Player;
8.  
9.          void Start()
10.               {
11.                   Player = GameObject.FindObjectWithTag("Player") //or you can just make the player variable public and drag and drop your player GameObject in the editor but this is neater... I think lol
12.               }
13.  
14.         void update()
15.              {
16.                   if(isPlayerDead){
17.                        Player.GetComponent<Rigidbody2D>().Simulated = false;
18.                    }
19.               }
20.          }
21.  
22.  
23.  

DISCLAIMER!!!:
(I think this code is 100% correct but I'm no Bill Gates and I wrote it off the top of my dome)

 

All of these are valid approaches. Depends if the player can respawn or not, depends if the level completely resets itself, or if some other feature can revive them (such as "Watch a video now to revive here!"). etc.

RBs and RB2Ds cannot be disabled but the same can be achieved by marking them as kinematic or not simulated, or just utterly deleting them. It really kinda comes down to the type of experience you're making.

 

It's incredibly common in games to swap one GameObject for another on death, too. So you could spawn a Player_Dead prefab with different logic without having to selectively enable/disable a bunch of things. Same for the enemies too.

 

If it is networked you probably don't want to go around destroying and recreating things, and instead just leave a corpse object there and recycle the player.

 

Just disable the dead player's GameObject (so it is not visible to the camera) and make the camera follow the action elsewhere. That is how my Game Over screen works (it also shows the Play Again button).

The player sees the debris from his exploded spaceship for a few seconds, then the camera that was following him starts following something still in the fight. The player can watch or play again. A less arcade experience would be to have the player respawn without resetting the entire game.

 

Thank you all for your great recommendations!

I think this is the route I will take!! Having a Prefab to swap out would be incredibly useful for what I'm going for, Thanks!

This was my thought too. How would you go about recycling the player? What would that logic look like? Something like this maybe: Player Dies > Instantiate Gravestone > Disable Collider and Sprite Renderer > Empty Inventory > Set a Respawn Timer ? Or something like that, just looking for technical ideas on this process.

I didn't know you could Disable an entire GameObject! That might be useful I'll try that. I've been disabling the Collider and Sprite Renderer with some success.