Keeping an eye on what’s important to players or "Hats"

In this post, you can see the shifts in development from what I thought I should be focusing on to making Carpoon better for players.

Autoworks Waves 

I implemented the change I mentioned in my last post, that Versus mode will shift from a “parking lot” to a horde/waves structure to limit the number of cars to fight for at any given time. There’s now a gold bonus car that also spawns lava cars to chase the player.   The level    is still in progress and I’ve been fiddling with parallax and GameMaker’s built-in heat effect.

I may simplify the Autoworks for co-op while leaving the lava + shape in versus. This will make it easier for new players, and also make it less concerning that cars drive into lava all the time. Cars do try and aim  for the jump pads but it's not perfect

Trucklings  are more  like ducklings 

Truckling mode   is finished! Protect your trucklings and if you die you spawn as one of them while it's last truck standing! Honk by pressing in the right stick to start and stop the trucklings.

To make them follow the player, I hacked  the path system I had to make the player the end destination point. I didn't quite ever nail a way to avoid the common 1-on-1 ending to these matches. Could have added more spots to hide trucklings such as behind bushes.

Parkin’ Panic Refresh

I  didn’t want to refresh this level’s graphics for a long time but it was the first one I  built and it came to a point where it seemed like a good idea. Thanks to my friend Yerk for building on my initial draft with more ideas!

I was somewhat worried about making it too visually busy but I tried and kept the colours muted without dark outlines.  One downside though is that I'll have to redo the trailer now lol

And it wasn't all for looks! There's now a little more   emergent gameplay with a  sewer geyser that causes cars to jump in the air and avoid being harpooned.

“Which one am I?”

In the past, some players did miss what truck they were, and this was exacerbated in a playtest. Decided it was finally time to tackle this with a few solutions:

1. Keeping player start spots the same in player select and the match and adding "P1/P2" etc under the  trucks and for a  few seconds  in the  game.

2. Staggering player spawning with controller rumble when they drop in.

3 Hats! One of my friends asked for this for a long time and I drew some of them during a livestream. But be warned! Adding hats will result in two new questions: Are they stackable? Can you date the trucks? Asked at two completely separate times.

Thanks to HPRShredder for the  cheesehead hat idea! 

4. Harpoons: Hats do take a lot of time with frames and the quicker solution was to draw different harpoons for each truck. Cosmetic only, but it’s a win to change their silhouette to make it easier for colour blind players. Another good suggestion   would have been patterns on trucks. 

5. Saving Player Customization: And what I’m still working on is to save player colours and hats after matches, and have players load back at their same spot with them when a match restarts. It’s been finicky changing over Carpoon’s “First-in” button press system, and also not worrying about save data on a new game, but I’m close to finishing. 

Jaggies be gone!

If you ever have something weird come up in your game, your past self might have added something in an unexpected place. The volcano level in Carpoon had some jaggies compared to everything else, including in the UI, and I thought the resolution was off for some reason. 

After beating my head against the wall for a while, it turned out that nope, that was all fine but clouds set gpu_set_texfilter(true), drew themselves, and then set gpu_set_texfilter(false) and caused the jagged look. I think I may have done this to try and make them look smoother at the time.

What’s next?

-Mostly focusing on finishing tasks I’ve started to get a new build up! It’s too easy to veer off course and start something fun like bosses

-More cars if you’re good! Long overdue feedback: Volcarnage Island can have nothing to do for a few seconds if the ship is coming in with more cars in single-player

-There are a few unknowns in Carpoon that I’ve been making players stumble on  that I may point out as loading screen tutorials such as cars can be drawn and quartered. Right-stick controls for aiming may also fit this, although Duck Game’s mini-area to break free of while learning the ropes would be the optimal (but more time intensive) route

How the classic  Duck Game teaches the required controls before diving into a match

-New (launch?) trailer & Steam page localization. Already added in  French; way easier to do than I thought.

In the end, I can see I fell into the trap of adding too much to a game. While talking to one of my artist friends, we realized it's easy from an art background to make all the art for features first instead of prototyping gameplay.    Having a quicker turnaround and smaller scope on the next one is something I’ll think about, along with a focus on single player (with an option for hybrid co-op) considering current trends unless I  choose to build on  Carpoon's framework.

Thanks for reading, wishlist Carpoon on Steam!

-Tom