The last few days and nights have been something of a blur for me as I work on Star Merchant 2.  All of the old C code has been ported over for some time now.  Everything from this point forward is all brand new, which is what I was hoping for.  The majority of my development time has been focused on all of the new features I’ve had planned out for a few months now.  It’s got me truly excited to see it all come together and work without too much pain.

It won’t be long before I’ll have the page for SM2 set up with some preliminary development screenshots, once I have some of the graphics finalized for certain parts of the game.  As I had already projected, making the graphics is one of the more time-intensive parts.

Thankfully, GIMP 2.6 with a ton of free plugins has eased that burden of creating a good baseline set of graphics.  If you haven’t used or seen it lately, you really should take another look at it.  They’ve managed to put together something that, in some ways, blows Photoshop right out of the water, especially from the programming standpoint of being able to write new plugins now quickly in Python.

Python, pygame, and the GIMP have all come through so far.  I’m hoping I can make it to the end of Star Merchant 2 very soon with a nice, polished game everyone can enjoy for free.