This month is just a quick update to show signs of life. I'm hard at work on a release version of the Survival Sandbox for Kickstarter backers, which will help me to test it before our upcoming Early Access launch.
More so than almost any other month the stuff I've been working on lately has been "under the hood", so I don't have much to show. I have been adding more discoverable locations and rock formations, but I want most of those to be something you see for the first time yourself while playing. Mostly I've been working on tweaks and quality-of-life improvements for the management and operation of your habitats and inventory.
One thing I can show is the newly added main menu screen. 90% of the "menus" in the game take place within your datapad because they are in-game representations of player interactions (like eating or picking up items). But some things - like changing the graphics quality and resolution, or loading a saved game - should be accessible from a main menu. This main menu can't rely on the datapad since if you aren't even playing the game yet then you don't technically have a datapad to view, so this main menu is more traditional. It's still very much a work in progress (the boring brown background will hopefully be improved), but you can see below some of the simple options that will be available in our backer release.
Some options may be added or removed before release, but we definitely hope to add more customization options over the course of development.
The last image above is how the menu will appear when overlaid on the game while paused. This was actually a bit more complicated than I thought it would be, because I had not yet actually implemented a pause mode in the game. The next step will be to include the menu hooks for saving and loading and ensuring that our save file system is reliable.
There are still lots of other little things to worry about and finish (deciding what "dying" looks like, ensuring randomized supply variability and reliable distribution, audio additions, tutorial elements, etc, etc [check our development roadmap to see more]), but we are getting so close to something playable. I hope you can all bear with me a little while longer!