Game Maker Studio 2: Why is my variable not being properly changed?

Question

Ok, so in my game you have a party of four characters that you control one at a time, each of which can lose health and die independently of each other. All of the player character objects use essentially the exact same code controlling their "deaths", (just with their own object variables and flags that get set and triggered etc.), but for whatever reason identical code does not produce identical results for all of the characters.

In particular, one of the character classes, the Alchemist, absolutely refuses to either set their "dead" flag to True properly, or at the very least the sections of code that are dependent upon "dead" being true do not appear to be acknowledging that it is. I've gone over all its events several times and monitored its behaviors in-game very closely, and everything about its malfunctioning behavior can be traced to the fact that it's completely ignoring the "dead = true;" line in one of its events while still executing the remaining code that follows it. Absolutely nothing else in any of its events sets or modifies this variable outside of its initialization in the Create event; it's just this one line of code that works perfectly for every other character object refuses to do its one job for this object in particular, and everything is falling apart because of it.

Does anyone know why this might be happening? Is there some quirk of proper GML practice that I'm not using?

If it helps, here's the code that gets triggered when a character is made "dead"

else if(wounded and position == 0 and !dead)
{
    dead = true;
    instance_create_layer(x,y,layer,obj_alchemist_corpse);
    death_sort();
}

Everything else is just a series of If statements that are triggered by 'dead' being true, but again, it would appear that one object in particular is executing the code in the above statement without actually setting 'dead' to true, and I would like to know why or why not.

EDIT: Forget what I said about an alchemist; further testing indicates it's just the second character in your party line of four that isn't getting their flag properly set.

Answer 1

Nevermind

Turns out, the problem was with the way I handled generating your selected party and the fact that modifying an object in a room with Creation Code doesn't completely replace the contents of the Create event, which long story short was secretly making hidden instances of the second character in your party underneath all the correct ones and throwing everything askew. This has since been rectified and now everything works just the way it should.