Who moved our cheese?

We're moving the game's release date to Spring 2002. Why, do you ask? Our top ten reasons:

10. Too distracted by this whole Harry Potter business
9. Having too much fun cooking with George Foreman grill
8. All our potential customers are wearing elf ears and "mithril" chainmail made out of Mountain Dew can tabs, sitting in line for Lord Of The Rings (who are we kidding? we'll see you there)
7. Morbidly depressed that Futurama premiere is so late in season
6. Spending entire days daydreaming about "Hall & Oates" reunion tour
5. Heck, it's going to take us weeks just to untangle the Christmas tree lights again this year
4. Sparky spends too much time trolling on Quarter To Three message boards
3. Our ship dangerously low on dilithium crystals
2. Peer pressure. That's also why we both got those tattoos that say...uh, never mind
1. We want the game to be more like Daikatana, so we're busy adding the robot frogs

Oh, and we added a few 3D screenshots from the trailer (er, which should come out sometime before Spring 2002).

Yup, we've entered the Independent Games Festival.We won't know if we're actually finalists until December 10, but feel free to use your supernatural mental abilities to beam good thoughts into the judges' heads for us. Points off for psychically setting their toaster ovens on fire, or forcing them to hear the "It's A Small World" song over and over.

Status update from the programming front since we last posted: Lars analyzed memory and CPU bottlenecks and made some important performance improvements, and rewrote some memory management functions and other internal housekeeping code. He's currently working on asset compression, some development tools, and general game AI.