It's finally time for our long-awaited website redesign.

Personally, I'm really sick of this fairly slow-loading blog design and unimpressive homepage. I want something that looks good. If you have suggestions, please comment. I need ideas.

The XNA version of FlatRedBall was released three days ago.

Time for me to transfer all of my code over. :(

Oh well, it'll be awesome because now I can code for 360 and Windows without dealing with annoying libraries.

Expect major progress soon.

EDIT: I did some hacking around tonight, and aside from some changed syntax and more streamlined input code, this isn't gonna be too difficult to port what I've done already. Maybe I'll post a tech demo with the new publishing tool later.

So, Nintendo relaunched their Smash Bros. website. I was kind of unimpressed by the gameplay overview and stage they introduced. Sure, there is a slightly tweaked graphic interface and some touched up graphics, but nothing I wasn't expecting.

Then I saw the list of musicians.

It's absolutely epic.

Some highlights (epic wins in all caps):

Masaaki Iwasaki (Mother 3 (Earthbound 2))
AKIHIRO HONDA (Metal Gear Solid Series)
Jun Fukuda (Killer 7)
KAZUMI TOTAKA (Animal Crossing Series) (Hell yes)
Hajime Wakai (Star Fox Series)
KENJI YAMAMOTO (Metroid composer) (OMFG Ridiculous)
KOJI KONDO (Composer of everything ever) (Holy crap)
Masato Kouda (Devil May Cry)
Shogo Sakai (Original composer of themes from SSB:M)
Tomoko Sasaki (NiGHTS) (epic)
YASUNORI MITSUDA (Chrono Trigger) (Ohhhhhh baby)
Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts series) (Booyah)
YUSA TSUJIYOKO (Fire Emblem) (You know you want this)

This makes me so happy.

So, an OCR mixer entered into a contest on www.broadjam.com in which one indie music artist's song would be put into the next DDR game.

He made it.

He won $1000 and a bunch of other prizes.

You can download the whole album for free at OCR. Just search for
'In the Dark' on the forums.

The name of the song is 'Until Forever'.

Pretty sweet, huh? I might have to buy the game out of internet loyalty.

Progress is being made on the game. Terrence has whipped up some nice WIP tracks for me. I will be doing code and music. I've got another friend as main artist and also doing music. (I guess I've got a lot of musician friends.)

Once the artwork gets going then things will really kick into high gear.

With the website redesign I'll make a new section devoted to the progress of the game.

If you have any talents and would like to contribute, please contact me.

EDIT: It has recently come to my attention that an XNA-specific version of the engine I am using is coming out sometime in May. As such, I will not continue coding until the new version comes out because I'm afraid the transition may break some code. But the XNA version has some features that are very nice, so it will be worth the wait. Progress on art and music will continue since the new version uses the same file formats.