From here on out, for brevity’s sake I’m going to refer to Star Merchant 2 simply as SM2.  It saves a lot of typing.

That said, a picture’s worth a thousand words.  With a little diligent hacking away in Python, the main menu and branching within the game is finished, according to the design document.

Here’s a peek at the new, improved main menu, complete with buttons that actually work and do things:

Star Merchant 2's Working Main Menu (click to enlarge)

It works quite nicely and fits in with the design concept of the game, so I may just keep the buttons as is for now.  They actually look much better rendered in the game than they do in GIMP, which surprised me.  If I had simply judged how they looked in the editor, I may have just gotten rid of them completely and started over again.  Good thing I didn’t.  Sometimes the simpler things are better.

I’m sure a lot of you are sitting there scoffing at the level of graphics in the game.  I fully recognize I’m not a graphic artist.  But I would like to think that they’re slightly above some amateur-level stuff.  In all fairness though, I would probably pay for a good graphic artist to come in and do some, if they were willing to work with the design document and concept.  Since this is a free project though, I’d rather that it be from a volunteer with a higher level of skill than I in that department who is willing to donate the time.

There’s still a lot of graphics left to do, including the myriad ship designs and various and sundry sprites.  Which seems to be the one thing that is eating up most of the project time.

Now, onto the rest of the game!