Back around March, I was given a great opportunity to have Carpoon as a mystery game tournament at LTX 2023. However, compared to demoing, the realization set in that this was a different type of pressure and my game couldn’t crash, and I knew there was a semi-rare hard crash that was happening. Could I fix this before the event on July 29th?

Well, what started as something that appeared small to fix at first, wasn’t. By using show_debug_message, I was able to pinpoint where the crash was happening around the deletion of a physics fixture, one of the keys for keeping the distance short between a truck towing a car in Carpoon. And it turned out that while in GameMaker you can test if an object exists, you can’t really do that for a physics object, at least from what I could find.

I had a couple of “Aha’s” along the way. It looked like deleting physics fixtures wasn’t always necessary, and they would take care of themselves when the game rebooted after a round. There did seem to be too many being created, and to check this I removed this physics fixture from the tow truck and put them into their own object. From here, I could count how many were in the game and add player and towed car references to see if they exist or not.

With eight days to go, I tested with my friends, and to my chagrin, Carpoon crashed within about 15 seconds. I had removed a line of code that didn’t make sense to me but was actually helping manage code trying to run twice during harpooning. What had happened, is that there was an inheritance issue with a player truck pulling attributes from a parent vehicle object, and these were actually running twice! This was the biggest help in preventing extra physics fixtures from being created.

Thanks to help from my friends' testing, we could tell Carpoon was pretty solid going in, and it didn’t crash during the event! The first round was mostly 60-second Parkin’ Panic VS, second round Autoworks VS, and the third round being last truck standing with baby trucks. 

Late in the day before the tournament, I found scores were starting to show as zero during a match but were fine in the summary. I left this to avoid breaking it during a last-minute scramble. Some players would be confused briefly but I let them know the situation.

Some tournament lessons learned:

-Wired controllers are the safest

-Know the venue and timing. Carpoon was going to be after the expo hall closed and I had to make sure I had a different type of pass

-Don’t give mid-round advice. Best to go over any rules beforehand and then leave the players be to avoid confusion, or having some think they missed out on tips

-Tournaments have limited time and can’t have tons of settings changed before the match begins. It’s one thing to play with friends and practice in the player selection, but before a tournament, all the settings were changing everywhere at times. To get around this, I’ll see about adding a cartoon lock on the player select to keep the level and time, etc set

You can check out the Carpoon-9iF--July29-build for what was played during the tournament. A big thank you to all the hours my friends put into testing, to Linus and LTX2023 for the opportunity, and to all the players who gave my game a chance there.