Author: Julia Hasanova

Problem

During this week of development, I encountered an issue with the Main Menu and Quit buttons on the Win Menu screen. When players finished the waves and reached the Win screen, clicking the Main Menu button didn’t load the main menu, and clicking the Quit button didn’t exit the game. Interestingly, the same buttons worked without issues on the Lose screen. This created an inconsistent player experience that needed fixing.

Solution

After debugging, I found that the problem was caused by the way button sound effects were handled, since initially a 0.3-second delay game instance calling function in BaseMenu was used to let the SFX finish playing before executing the main menu load, and the button’s click handler was not properly referencing the game instance on the Win screen. On the Lose screen, the reference was valid, which is why the button worked there.

To fix this, I moved the button sound playback from the Style tab to the Event Graph, using PlaySound2D in the Results widget. After playing the sound, I used a short delay to allow the sound to play fully and then called the C++ function HandleMainMenuButtonClicked(). Then used the same logic for the quit button. That function safely retrieves the CodeGameInstance via the existing helper and calls ExitToMainMenu() without relying on the previous 0.3-second timer from the helper:

if (UCodeGameInstance* GameInstance = GetCodeGameInstance())
{
    GameInstance->ExitToMainMenu();
}
This approach fixed the Win screen main menu and Quit buttons while still allowing the SFX to play fully, avoided repeated casting, and kept the code clean and maintainable. Players can now seamlessly return to the main menu after a match.