UPDATE: 21 FEB 2020
Some fun and ambitious updates! After submitting yesterday's Devlog I realized that the hit detection left a bit to be desired. The spaceships (as seen above) look like inverted T's but are actually just square images with transparency. So if a laser hit any part of the square it registered as a hit, even if the ship's hull is not in that region of the drawing.
To amend this, I turned the fighter objects into two unique rectangles. Now the small cockpit of the fighters can be individually targeted with greater accuracy.
I added another weapon and experimented with getting smoother shot animations. Though I can accomplish this on my computer the real question is how will it look on yours? I imagine a PC at 2GHz might run the game a bit differently than one at 3GHz, etc.
My favorite addition so far are the dynamic fighter animations, as seen above. The fighters actually change their appearance based on how much damage they've sustained! You can see a couple with their cockpits shot up and a few more with some wing damage.
Those are still placeholder graphics, btw, just slightly better so I could better judge how it would turn out.
Lots of things on my to-do list, but three that are more important:
1) Letting the fighters shoot back
2) Giving the fighters better/random logic
3) Cleaning up my 500+ lines of code so I can follow the program easier!
Thanks for reading and TGIF!