I 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.

A small comparison of what would happen with the old camera  in one scenario:

-Used YellowAfterlife’s multi-object tracking camera script. Helped for a great start over the heavily modified Tom Francis camera from his GameMaker tutorial series but reactions were instant to keep everything on screen! 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

-With the instantaneousness of the new camera, I had to add lerps and send out camera trackers from the player to smooth things out. It was finicky to send camera trackers to a set height, like at the top of the volcano, and keep passing that exact spot along to avoid quick camera jumps

-Added a player deadzone to prevent the camera from moving when players are doing tight turns. Makes the screen less jumpy for other players. This deadzone shrinks when the player is travelling in a straight line so the camera tracker keeps up with the player.

-Lessened screenshake and removed screen tilt based off feedback

-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

Other updates:

-While zooming out is quick to keep players on screen, I slowed down zoom-in because it felt too intense otherwise.

-Adjusted Xbox controller support so  new  Xbox controllers  work in the itch.io version. Found out they  get detected as a bluetooth controller,  legacy Xbox controller and keyboard. 

Things that would have been a bonus:

-Weighting objects for camera priority

-Smooth lerp into border edges (Spent a lot of time on this, but may have had a bug throwing me off before I decided it was good enough)

-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 was 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!