Below I present how the front menu of the game currently looks:
There are quite a few interesting objects of significance to point out from this screen. First, the game's title logo makes its first appearance. The thin lines and spacious kerning reflect the emptiness the title speaks of. And in an attempt to also quietly convey that Vacuous has a science fiction theme, the letters themselves are similar in composition to the letters on a digital clock (though they cannot be strictly derived from one of those screens). This version of the title logo also has a few odd letter segment spacing issues which have been sorted out in a later version.
My intentions were to keep the menu screen clean and simple in a way which was non-intrusive, but pretty. As a non-artist, I think I have done okay, but I might need to add a little more background life somehow (the distant sun currently has some animation in that its glow fades and grows along a sine wave). I have made the tiles and titles of the menu animate slickly as they transition from menu page to menu page, giving a polished, alive look, but have also made sure that access to the actual game play from the game boot-up is under 30 seconds.
One incredibly subtle thing of note to point out here is that in this screen the game is actually running at a 4:3 resolution (1024x768). While the game is developed with 16:9 in mind (I get the impression this is now the default aspect ratio for entertainment media), I also have made sure that the game works fully with both 4:3 resolutions and 16:10 resolutions. If it so happened that another aspect ratio beyond those warranted support, adding it to the game now would be trivial.
Finally, I have fully added gamepad support. In the menu screenshot, keyboard button prompts can be seen. If the player is using a gamepad, button prompts based on the popular Xbox controller will instead be used. The only uncertainty here is the legal ramifications of using facsimiles of these buttons in my game. If anyone knows whether or not Microsoft will screw me over on this, I would like to know! (I am guessing not, since I developed the assets myself and they only loosely resemble the Xbox 360 buttons, but with lawyers you never know).
With most of the menu fully operationally now, the next step is to finish the world map screens and the save/load system and then get to work building the actual game.
