I figured that I would need a more fitting ship design, so I made something resembling the form of a hammerhead shark, which I decided will also become the name of the game. Further, it also resembles a crossbow, which will look nice once I implement projectiles being shot from it. I added a smoke trail as well, which not only makes the game look nicer but also acts as a good way of visualizing player movement in the dark depths of space.

I decided that I would make a turret which shoots saw blades at the player, something akin to a homing missile but which doesn’t actually follow the player. Instead, the turret should always aim at the player and shoot a barrage of fast projectiles at his location. The resulting sawblade turret now shoots two blades at the same time and about five pairs in quick succession, with some randomization amongst the pairs to make it harder to predict their trajectories.

Further, I added a command unit component, which usually sits in the centre of a ship. Larger ships will have several of them. Once all of them are destroyed, the ship begins a counter until self-destruction.

There was an issue with collision detection, which needed some customization. Instead of using the built-in collision detection using hit events, which is not only imperfect but also computationally expensive, I now use a sphere collision function. This means that only the player’s vessel will check for collision with ship parts, which means that I can define the damage output as well as the radius of the collision.

Next week, I will implement arrows being shot by the player and the gameplay aspects connected to them.