If you're not a fan of sandbox games you should probably move on.  If you like playing in the sandbox, meet your new favorite game...

I played quite a bit of Terraria.  For anyone who didn't get on that one, it's essentially Minecraft, setup like a platformer with Super Nintendo graphics.  Worth the 2.50 or whatever it costs on sale on Steam.  Like any community Terraria has it's own special kind of gamer drama and about a year ago the dev said he was stopping game updates, peace out.  Around that time, the spriter for that game, Tiy, started his own studio and began working on his "dream game" which is best discribed as 'Terraria with spaceships'.  That doesn't really do this game justice.  Let me tell you what sets this game apart...

Procedural Generation.

Starbound isn't made at the development side, it's actively built for every player with the elements the devs have built.  You may pickup a gun, the game assigns that weapon a random model, random ammo-type, random range, random damage, random modifiers, etc, etc, etc.  Every element of the game is like this.  You go to a planet and the biomes are random, the gravity, the difficulty, the weather, the creatures, the plants, the dungeons, armor, weapons, NPC villages...pretty much everything.  Also, any randomly generated monster can be captured, then trained to fight for you.  It's like Pokemon Infinite!  No one is going to play the same game.

From the developer Tiy:

Visually there are currently 21,000 combinations of Rocket Launcher in the game. Stats wise there are millions.  This procedural generation not only changes the way the gun works
completely, but it changes the look of the gun too! You may never find
the same weapon twice.

Also, you can build mechs.

So this game is going to be bananas, and have full co-op, multiplayer, and PVP. We gotta get some guildies on board so we can share planet co-ords and work together to do stuff and stuff.

There isn't a firm release date except before year end 2013, but pre-orders are imminent (like announced today or tomorrow), and pre-ordering will be cheaper than the release price and get you beta access.

So who's down!?

Resources:

Development Roadmap

Online Character Creator

Official Forums

Edit: Preorders are up already! $15 is the min buy in.