things seem to speed up a bit, as everyone is willing and ready to finish the project as soon as possible.

our new gfx guy is having slight problems with the engine it seems, he might need some attempts to fully understand the used engine and provide perfect results, but we are on the way. if everything goes straight, there will be new screenshots in the next three days.

our artist jayne, responsible for storyline and handdrawn backgrounds will have some time again from 7th novemeber on. this means we can expect progress in this matter.

some translators are already contacted, as soon as the storyline has been finalized, the texts will be sent out for translation into different languages. this will make giana a multi language game :) we will keep the storyline short, so don’t expect a fully featured book a la harry potter :D

we really want to push out the game in the next two months and we will do our best for this, but please everyone – the game is done, when it’s done. the public beta which was spreading around was a small failure as it contained bugs, which destroyed the gamefun pretty easy, we don’t want to have something like this again. we want a 101% product and not a 95% one… it’s also in your sense and will grant the fun you are looking for, at least for some hours :)

the ones who offered translation…  confirmed are catalan, dutch and spanish – the other guys didn’t reply to our e-mails :(

our coder is working on bugfixes, the grahpic guy has started his job and the organizer is doing his job as well – everything is progressing :) pretty senseless posting, eh? ;)

…after some troubles with our internal tools, the gfx guy is ready to rock! probably we will have new ingame screenshots AFTER the following weekend!

The fun goes on…

• Music API fix (+log)
• Smashed stones are now based on the tileset and not on the sprites set

As usual… the game is not available for the public yet. For those who offered to do a translation of the storyline etc, we will get back on you soon.

our new team member has recieved the internal tools and will start the action during this day, whish him luck ;)

after a heavy motivation lack of the organizer (the coder and beta tester were still pretty active) here comes a larger update…

• we have a new graphic artist, who was and is involved in commercial gba and nds games. he will take care of the tilesets and will adjust them to the backgrounds of each world. we can assure you, the first drafts look excellent and the game will rock even more. if the first tileset has been retouched, you’ll find a screenshot or more here.
• our main musician operator is currently not reachable, or not answering our mails, for whatever reason. this ain’t too bad, because there are two other people who are willing to help out. music isn’t really an issuse and quality chipmusic is granted as well. the two guys i am talking about made a soundtrack for “poussin”, the successor of “xump” (gp32, dreamcast, win32) but as the second part of xump will take some time, we will just misuse the unreleased tracks for giana.
• parts of the storyline are drawn, just minor work is left.
• when time comes, we need few translators, who will localize the game into their mother tongue. so far there is an english version and a pretty poor german translation. basically everything is possible if we have a translator: french, spanish, hungarian, finish, swedish, whatever… but for this we will need you! you can already start posting in the comments, we will get back to you. english, french and german are already covered.

if we keep the speed as it is, we hope to pull the game out by around new year, but this shouldn’t be a promise ;)

Changes:

some fixes & tweaks (boss animation ordering…)
new boss routine for caveman
new “all bosses in a row” world (after world 5)
pictures are now 24bits bmp, displayed in 16 bits (sdl transform)
water world is back with default tileset

(Beta is not public… but you can see things are going ahead again! :) )

Some guy is obviously waiting for Giana’s Return and started a thread here:
http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?t=4715

You may start bets, if we will ever finish or not :) LOL

…as you have recognized, the blog doesn’t get frequent updates anymore – The case should be pretty clear to everyone already, the team has a hughe lack of motivation. We wont abadon the project, but good things will take time.