I have created a title screen and a setup menu. The title screen itself was pretty easy to design; I just took the in-game background, modified it a bit and put a title on it. For the main menu, I tried something else than the boring rectangular buttons. Here’s what it looks like:

The symbol right of the buttons is the warning sign for antimatter. It’s designed by Anders Sandberg, along with an entire series of futuristic warning signs. Some of his other creations are signs for space-time distortions, nanoparticles and artificial intelligence systems. You can see the entire collection on his Flickr page.
I have also created the setup menu for changing the display and control settings. While I was at it, I greatly improved the code from Sub Commander. A major improvement over the previous version is that you no longer need to exit the game and restart before the changes take effect. Another improvement is that the code I wrote now is very reusable; I can just copy the file to a new project, change a few filenames and variables and voila!

This is a major milestone; from now on all work will be on enemies and levels. I have already started designing some enemies, and I expect it to take quite a while. I have made three pages full of sketches and doodles yesterday, of wich I think four may be usefull. There will be a few enemies that appear throughout the entire game, while others are level-specific. I’m also gonna design a few bosses (I think two difficult bosses are required at least), something I entirely forgot in my first attempt.