Solution: Shout out to FedericoCalchera in the Discord who gave me the solution.

"the problem is that On collision runs once for each object that collided. So there's always just one instance picked.

Is overlapping on the other hand would work in this case"

So in short, I just changed the "On collision with another object" to "Is overlapping another object" and that solved it!

So I've read through all the other posts covering this and for some reason still can't get this to work for me. I've done it before, but that was many years ago and I'm out of practice, but I know it's possible...

What I am trying to achieve is have my Player shoot a projectile that damages an enemy on collision.

This works, but the issue is that if the enemies are bunched up together then it damages multiple enemies. I've tried every version of pick an instance that I can think of and so far nothing has worked.

This is what I currently have:

Any suggestions on what I'm doing wrong would be much appreciated!

Managed to get it to work! I think I was just over complicating it and using the pick nearest incorrectly. Got help from the construct discord and someone gave me the answer to create an instance on the player to hold the UID of the nearest sprite in the family and then based on who matches that UID it'll run the events.

Not sure if the screenshots are showing, but I'll try to attach on here.

There is a pick nearest/furthest instance condition if that will work for you here.

Yeah, I was trying to use that but I think I had just been working on it for wayyy too long and needed to take a step back and gut the events to simplify everything.

After neatening it up, I've to it working better. But the outlines are still a bit wonky. It'll still have two of the sprites outlined at the same time. Here's a screenshot of the events

I've been trying to do this for the last two days, and at this point, I think I am so wrapped up in it that I must be missing a very simple and normal way to do this.

Problem:

I've got a family of sprites, when overlapping one of them I need to select that instance (creating an outline when selected and deleting it when not selected/overlapping). When an instance is selected and a key is pressed I need it to change states and do something.

The issue here is when I am overlapping more than 1 instance it either changes both of their states or will keep the first one I overlapped with selected even if I move out of its collision area while still overlapping the 2nd instance.

I feel like I've tried all the obvious ways of picking the closest instance to me when 2 or more instances are selected, but obviously, I am missing something. Any suggestions would be great! This is for a game jam, so if I can't figure it out in the next couple of days I'll just have to leave it how it is...