What causes projectiles hitting their owner or allies?

The projectile applies damage to anything it overlaps without recording who fired it, so it can hit the caster on spawn or any same-team unit it passes through.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Projectiles Damaging Their Own Team From a Missing Owner Check

Quick answer: Stamp each projectile with its owner and team at spawn, and skip damage when the hit target shares that team or is the owner.

A bullet that damages the shooter or their squad is missing an owner-and-team check on impact. Tag the projectile at spawn and filter on hit. Here is the fix.

How to fix it

1. Stamp owner and team at spawn

When you spawn the projectile, store a reference to the instigator and their team id on it, so the hit logic always knows who fired it.

2. Filter hits by team

On overlap, ignore the hit if the target's team matches the projectile's team, or if friendly fire is disabled, rather than applying damage unconditionally.

3. Ignore the owner near spawn

Skip collisions with the owner for the first frames after launch so a projectile spawned inside the caster's collider does not immediately damage them.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Pygame error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.