Hello all. After having a less than productive week last week I’ve got my act together and actually made some progress.
I’ve got all the songs back from my friends by now and they’re most awesome all of them. It seems the game will only have three levels instead of the four intended, the graphics are taking a long time to make, and I haven’t completely finished a single level yet.
This game has a lot of cool technical features, which I entirely for my own amusement will list now.

• Advanced bitmap-caching for the objects in the ball
• Custom music loader that supports multiple servers with fallback
• Logging of gameplay statistics (to see how people play the game)
• Neat level format that supports animating the entire level
• Heated seats and cup holders

All of these are already in the game and if I get my way there’ll be a few more before next Friday, which is when the game’s due. This also happens to be the release date for the Wii in Europe so I’d like it to be done by Thursday night so I can spend the weekend in Hyrule. Though I fear that is a bit optimistic, after all, it’s not real game development without the crunch.

As the attentive may have noticed I’ve also changed the theme for the blog, I felt the old one was a bit murky and I just couldn’t resist the tasty ajax-ness of K2.

Finally I’d like to plug Kongregate, a startup game site with a fresh new community way of doing things. It’s in closed alpha right now, but I suspect that if you request an invite you’ll get one.
They give away weekly prices for the best games, and has a big competition running until the 15th of December with a first prize of $1500. Nice!