Back in January, I had feedback that the harpoon doesn't always fire at an even distance. I also knew that sometimes it would wildly fire off to the side and latch onto a statue, especially when not aiming the right stick.

Knowing that this wasn't going to be an easy problem to solve, but that I had done it a long time ago so maybe I had some better ideas now, I slowly tackled the problem.

1) Starting off, I simplified harpoon firing into scripts instead of having a long page of if statements within if statements. This helped turn on and off features to see what might be causing the issue. At first, it was great to put in  code quickly to get things working, but now it needed to be cleaned up.

2) At one point I tried reducing the harpoon's distance from center to nothing, and found the issue amplified. This led to an 'aha' moment where I realized the harpoon physics shape was colliding with the truck it was firing from. Usually, the harpoon went sideways when firing forwards, and it turned out that was because the truck is fairly long. I had a collision event for picking up broken off harpoons, but that could be turned off and implemented in code with place_meeting.

3) The harpoon physics shape wasn't at 0,0, so I tried centering that for the local force applied to it. Not sure if that helped and I might move it back to align with the harpoon sprite!

4) Part of the harpoon firing at different lengths is how it looks when firing while parked and while moving. I created two different amounts of force depending on each one and blended the two for when you are moving at less than max speed. I'll see how firing backwards works out in playtesting, with a potential solution of having a longer cord if people have too much of an issue. A recent GDC talk by Butterscotch Shenanigans showed a grapple hook solution they had was to consider the firing point the start point and extend either way.

5) Not really related but part of that Butterscotch Shenanigans talk about "Forgiveness Mechanics" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCnZhs-92j0 mentioned about allowing button inputs earlier than expected. To improve gameplay, I added a 0.1~0.2 second timer that lets you press the harpoon trigger early and fire the harpoon right away. I also made the harpoon able to latch onto things while on the way back briefly but that needs some more fine tuning.

With that tough harpoon issue out of the way, I implemented a new mode I called "Stock Taker," inspired by Diddy Kong Racing's egg taking multiplayer level but with the twist that these are all your stock, or lives, exposed out in the open. Meaning that once they're all gone, it's game over for that player. I was debating about adding a paint shop to steal other player's trucks for your own as an option but decided simpler was better with crushing only for the time being.

And finally, I am grateful that there are options like Parsec and Steam Remote Play to make playing Carpoon possible online with friends during these times of social distancing. Without those, testing would be pretty tough!