Lesson 6: Practice Time!

Now that you know the structure of a function, it’s time to build your own — two of your own, in fact!

In the last exercise, you learned the lines of code needed to damage a player character in Fortnite. It would be better if you didn’t have to type those same lines every time you needed that code.

1. Declare a function named HurtPlayer(). It will have a return type of void, which means it won’t return a value. Put the function declaration at the very end of your Verse file. The body of the function is the same code from Lesson 5: Practice Time, so check there if you need a refresher.

   Verse

        HurtPlayer() : void =
            Playspace: fort_playspace = GetPlayspace()
            AllPlayers: []player = Playspace.GetPlayers()
            if (FirstPlayer : player = AllPlayers[0]):
                if (FortniteCharacter : fort_character = FirstPlayer.GetFortCharacter[]):
                    FortniteCharacter.Damage(50.0)
   

   Copy full snippet(6 lines long)

   You can't define a function within another function, so make sure all your functions are indented to the same level as OnBegin().

2. You now have a function you can use any time you want to do damage to a character. But declaring a function does not run the code in the function body. To do that, you need to call the function. Be sure to call these functions within OnBegin().

   Verse

        HurtPlayer()
        Print("Player Hurt")
   

   Copy full snippet(2 lines long)

3. By now you may have guessed that there is also a method that heals a character. It's named Heal(), and you can call it exactly the same way that you call Damage(). Create your HealPlayer() function at the end of your Verse file using this code.

   Verse

        HealPlayer() : void =
            Playspace: fort_playspace = GetPlayspace()
            AllPlayers: []player = Playspace.GetPlayers()
            if (FirstPlayer : player = AllPlayers[0]):
                if (FortniteCharacter : fort_character = FirstPlayer.GetFortCharacter[]):
                    FortniteCharacter.Heal(20.0)
   

   Copy full snippet(6 lines long)

4. Now add the HealPlayer() call to the function calls in the body of OnBegin().

   Verse

        HurtPlayer()
        Print("Player Hurt")
        Sleep(5.0)
        HealPlayer()
        Print("Player Healed")
   

   Copy full snippet(5 lines long)

You may notice that there's a new call to the Sleep() function. Basically, Sleep() makes the program wait before continuing to run the code that comes after. The wait time is determined by the parameter you pass to Sleep(), represented in seconds. (You’ll learn more about parameters in a later lesson.) Without Sleep() here, HealPlayer() would run immediately after HurtPlayer(), and you wouldn’t notice the effect of both function calls.

Complete Script

using { /Fortnite.com/Devices }
using { /Fortnite.com/Characters }
using { /Fortnite.com/Playspaces }
using { /Verse.org/Simulation }
using { /Verse.org/Verse }

hello_world_device := class(creative_device):

    # Runs when the device is started in a running game
    OnBegin<override>()<suspends>:void=

Next Lesson

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  Lesson 7: Specifying the Result of a Function

  Sometimes you want a result; sometimes you don't.