Get the message?

Hullo my old fruit! Check MY moves! A solid day of coding today (well, evening anyway) has delivered up the message screen and engine. It's not graphically 100% yet, but I'm not going to over-dress things. The status screen looks nice and crisp (even if the text positioning needs a little shove) and I want to keep things as clean and clear as possible. I've also added a new ship model - a heavy freighter. I intend to revisit all the models once the game logic is complete, and in fact all of the visuals will be retouched and improved once the frame of the game is complete, but it's playing like a dream so far. With the Docking License thing added, there's a real motivation to get blasting, and the status screen now shows how many kills were legal and how many were murders. This is vital when you're concentrating on your legal status and ranking levels and it's really nice that things are starting to hang together. I've got the messages nailed much quicker than I thought, so tomorrow we start the "creative meetings" for the game, where Charlotte and I start working together on the visual elements of the game. I'm going to need lots of graphics for commodities, ship upgrades, missions, and the sector map. From a code perspective, I honestly will get the police and races in tomorrow...honest!

A few screenshots from the latest build: