It works if I call it near the start of the level, and even after playing for a bit it still worked. I suspect it might be due to position, since there's certain areas where pressing the key doesn't seem to call it, and there's floating ships sometimes visible off in the distance. It finally worked when I made it to one of those, but any attempts to call the ship didn't seem to do anything until I reached it.
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Hey thanks for looking into it. So the ship spawnpoints are on each intersection, when the alert level is high enough and there's less than 10~ish cops backup ships will randomly spawn at these points. When the player holds "call escape ship" it will find the intersection closest to the player and spawn there (sometimes this leads to the ship spawning behind or around the corner from the player making it hard to notice). There might be an issue if the cop backup ship and player escape ship spawn at the same spot, but they don't even have collisions right now so it's hard to think of an issue that might cause.
Also currently the player can "re-call" the escape ship as many times as they want and it will simply teleport to the nearest intersection.
Thanks again for taking the time to look into it!