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!