Some good news and some bad news and than again rather good news

Game is progressing well in terms of the artwork. Got some fantastic sketches from Ben from http://www.piketoon.com/ - won't show you everything, just have a taste of what's coming:

I do prefer to work with the right artwork rather than temporary graphics, because it allows an early polish-optimisation (if I can call it that way). Essentially having this simple sketch inspired me with some code changes that hopefully will improve the game-play and player's visual experience in general.

The bad news for me, for some XNA users and for all Torque X 2D (or whatever the current name is) is that Microsoft is pulling out a new version of XNA - 4.0 which is NOT backward compatible with the current 3.1. More importantly Torque X 2D (or whatever the current name is) won't be supporting XNA 4.0. What it means is that I (and a few other peeps) will be soon royally f..ked with out existing project.

Good news is that there is a community 'movement' which is focused on:
a) fixing stuff that isstill  f..cked up in the Torque X 3.5.1.
b) porting TorqueX to the XNA 4.0.

So essentially there is hope. Will report on that more soon (once I get some decent sleep.)