I've got some new screenshots of where we're at today. I've got a fair amount of groundwork in place – you can register in the game, set up your "empire" (just give it a name for now), your device is registered with C2DM so that we can send you notifications (e.g. "your base is under attack!", things of that nature).

Keep in mind, as always that this is a work in progress, and all of the images are just place-holders that I whipped up in a couple of minutes... so first up is the "starfield" view:

Here we have a star selected (with the white circle around it). Over on the right, it has your empire name ("Great Fire" in this case) and how much money you have (just a placeholder here...). Under that is the name of the selected star ("iusbue" – I need to work on my random name generator!) and under that you can see a representation of the planets orbiting that star.

Clicking "Zoom In" takes you to the solar system view for that star:

Now again, these images are just place holders that I made using the GIMP in about 5 minutes, so they're not great. but (from left-to-right) we've got an Earth-like planet, a desert planet, a gas giant, an inferno planet and a toxic planet. These are similar to the planet types you'll find in Master of Orion.

The idea is that different types of planets will have different properties and different strengths and weaknesses. At the moment, when the starfield is generated, all planet types are equally likely (I had to scroll around quite a bit to find a star with a decent array of planets like this...) but I'm thinking we should probably make the earth-like planets more common, and some of the other less common. What the exact properties and strengths/weaknesses are I haven't decided yet either. I could decide to remove some of these planet types from the game altogether – just depends if I can find a reason for them, really.

Also, the images for the planets are just hard-coded images I came up with in the GIMP. What would be really cool is if I could generate images for the different planet types on-the-fly. That way, every planet could be slightly different and the game wouldn't be quite so boring to look at.

The plan is that on the solar system page you'll be able to also see a representation of your colonies (perhaps over on the right side when you tap a planet) as well as any ship fleets you have and stuff like that.