I recently finished Carpoon’s second last milestone to more clearly show objectives before matches. One more to go!

Here's my devlog on implementing the objectives and other recent changes:
And I did add a setting to skip the objectives once you are used to them

Other Updates
• Harpoonable start button replaced floating text

• Signs that require holding the harpoon
• Tried analog input to drive slower at times
• Hold brake (L-Trigger) to go in reverse in tight spots

•Key art update

Only 1 more milestone to go to improve some of the risk vs reward game essence in VS mode! I’ve already started by changing the “parking lot” in VS to waves as well to keep a limited number of targets.

Thanks for reading and following along!
-Tom

Finished another major milestone recently by rebuilding Carpoon’s camera! It was a feature requested by several players to remove some constant shakes it had. These shakes happened while trying to zoom in or out to keep players in view, or so I thought.

-Used YellowAfterlife’s multi-object tracking camera script https://yal.cc/gamemaker-view-following-two-objects-at-once/
-Found there was still some shakiness and it turned out the truck rumble was translating to camera coordinates. Removing this aspect fixed the camera by half
-New camera was too quick to react! Had to add lerps and send out camera trackers from the player to smooth things out.
-Added a player deadzone to prevent the camera from moving when players are doing tight turns. Makes the screen less jumpy for other players
-Clamped the camera within borders on some levels to not zoom out too much. Created a separate object for the camera to track that follows the player around to do this
-While zooming out is quick to keep players on screen, I slowed down zoom-in because it felt too intense otherwise.

Things that would have been a bonus:
-Weighted objects for camera priority
-Smooth lerp into border edges
-Spent a lot of time trying to have a look-ahead point again but I ran into issues where the camera would move too quickly from side to side, or not keep up with the player and they would go offscreen. Having borders with a maximum range that the camera could go and a center point that kept onscreen helped make this not as needed.

Next milestones:
1 Clearer “How-to play” and objectives
2 Fix up some of the game essence for risk vs reward in 1 or 2-player mode
3 Release game!