I have been hard at work creating the menus which allow the user to access the game. Why develop these so soon? Well, I do want to get all of the boring menu/infrastructure bits out of the way so that I can focus on the actual production of game content. I also feel that these parts of a game define the patterns that the game production must follow. A little hard to put into words, but I can give an example. I want to develop the world map system before I create a ton of levels, since the way the world map works determines what levels need to be developed and how they get integrated into the game (both for general access and save systems).
For the menus in Vacuous I decided to just hard code everything using one object that runs controls a finite state machine. Abysmal architecture, but the menu system is simple enough that I can get away with a lazy hack job. At the very least, the menus do have slick and snappy animations. When that stuff is finished (sometime this week), I will show it off.
Anyways, here I present a screenshot of an early level in the game:
