What causes a GameMaker homing projectile that orbits its target instead of hitting it?

The projectile's turn rate cannot keep up with its speed, so at close range it cannot curve tightly enough to connect and instead loops around the target endlessly.

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 a Homing Projectile Overshooting and Orbiting Its Target in GameMaker

Quick answer: Cap or reduce the projectile speed relative to its turn rate, increase steering near the target, and allow a small detonation radius so near-misses still count.

If a homing projectile spirals around an enemy without ever landing, its turn rate is too low for its speed. Rebalancing those (and adding a hit radius) fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Balance turn rate and speed

Limit how far the direction can change per step so the turning circle is smaller than the distance to the target; lower speed or raise the per-step turn if not.

2. Steer harder when close

Increase the steering response as the projectile nears the target so it can correct sharply instead of overshooting at the last moment.

3. Use a proximity detonation

Detonate within a small radius of the target so a near-miss that would otherwise orbit still registers as a hit.

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 GameMaker 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.