I've now started work on some of the artwork. I'm not very good, and I imagine that this game will be a pretty big learning curve. Anyway, here it is, the second peice of art I've ever made:

This is a space-probe, powered by an A.I. that approaches the player when they enter a specific system. There's a fair bit more to it after that. But no spoilers.

Here it is when you first see it:

The inspiration for this guy came from this image.

Next things

Having done this I've realised that I need some sort of arbitrary animation. In the above you can see the probe moves around a little, this is animated in the engine. But I thought it would be cool if the little light on it flashed or something, or a glint would move across the solar panel.

To do this I'd need to add animated background image support to the engine. Not that big of a deal. But the current animation of moving around is also something that needs to be addressed. Right now, I just crammed it in, but I need to make it a modifiable setting when creating the events. Some backgrounds, like a planet, shouldn't move, others like this should move. Some might move a lot more rappidly, like maybe this guy will when he gets aggitated by the player.