Screenshots!

To give an idea of what the current engine state looks like, I bring you... screenshots!  Bear in mind that these are still early days, so the main world environment is a bit sparse.

The game takes place inside a planetoid, that you have taken the job of exploring in order to retrieve an artifact.  In the planetoid you find some remains of previous alien technology, as well as some particularly unfriendly biological entities that are infesting the inside.  These currently go under the name the Scourge, but this is also subject to change.

Note that a noise texture and slight RGB-channel-separation effect are used in order to give the game a more retro look, but in screenshots the appearance looks a lot more fuzzy than in reality due to the per-pixel noise being constant.  The text in the top left is just for debugging purposes, and certainly won't be present in the final game.

This first screenshot demonstrates the basic world perspective i.e. top-down (or side-on, depending on which way you want to look at it) with an 8-way scrolling world.  The player ship (central) is firing both projectiles and an electricity-based weapon at a small number of enemies.  The RPG elements are clear by the health bar over each enemy as it is being damaged - certain weapon types will damage specific enemies more or less, so this feedback is important.

This is a slightly more recent screenshot showing the particle effects that have just been implemented, in this case shown as smoke when an enemy explodes.

Another screenshot with more of the smoke particle effect.  At the current time it supports up to 65536 texture-mapped quads' worth of particles without noticeably decreasing the stall caused by GPU-based collision stencilling.

Over the last couple of days a space-warping effect has also been added for the more powerful weapons, but this effect doesn't come across well in screenshots.