Extinctathon! Current short-term goals

I've got some time today and hopefully more during the week, so I've got a couple of big goals to work towards. The main one is to get the level loading and saving working (level meaning the list of blocks, list of enemies, start point, end point, and a few other bits of info). I was having some trouble, conceptually, with this, but Shawn Hargreaves came to my rescue and explained what all I needed to do. Before I do this, however, I need to make a big change.

Yes, you guessed it....SPRITE SHEETS.

Right now I'm loading 20 different textures and switching between them multiple times per call to Draw(). This is very GPU intensive, so I've heard, and it's much better to load them all into a single image and then draw specific portions of that image onto the screen. The reason I have to do this BEFORE I do the level saving and loading mechanism is that it will replace the lists of sprites that make up the animations of the various characters with lists of rectangles describing where these sprites can be found on the master sheet. This will be a pretty big overhaul, and I forsee spending my whole day (well, up until noon) working on it. Fun.

UPDATE:
I have the sprite sheets working, using the incredibly helpful projects here. I spent most of the morning just adjusting all the draw and bounds-checking calls to work with the new system. I'd say I'm about 20% done with the Level content pipeline system. It's going to take a good deal of work, but I think I can do it. Once that is done, I can work on making a few more enemies, Block types, and a system for implementing power-ups. Once that is done, I can get to work on some serious level editing--after a few much-needed improvements to the level editor, that is. And I still need to get the menus working, either by adapting the examples found here or by rolling my own in some fashion that won't make the code completely unreadable. Either way that seems like a big ordeal.