So many little things

Wow, there are a lot of little things that go into making a game. You would think that I would remember that, since I have shipped one game (a long time ago). And I do remember it, but it always amazes me how many little things go into making a fully polished game. Today I spent some time on a few of the little things, like showing the name of a city on the navigation screen when you mouse over it. They're little, but very important. I'm not even talking about the microscopic stuff yet...

Anyway, the player's ship now loads properly between levels... before it would leave some stuff behind, like what weapons they had, and their entire cargo... it was like some sort of greedy border customs. But now it's all good. I still don't have game saving/loading, as I re-ordered priorities since I had trouble motivating myself to do the load/save framework.

Instead I worked a little more on missions. Now missions can lead you to other levels, and there's a hacked-together bounty hunting mission. It's not too exciting yet, since the AI just stupidly hunts you all the time, and it's easy to outsmart it. But the enemy ship is spawned correctly, in the correct region. I did a little work on the "little things" for mission creation too, like showing the mission description.

Anyway, here's a concept sketch for the ones who just like to look at pictures.