The lava world has got some tuning and looks much better than before. Here is the proof:

Additional to the screenshots there are of course more news. The lava world is fully converted to the new set, which makes a sum of 28 complete levels. We are working on three more worlds and then we can consider this game finalized.

Unfortunatly we wont make the release at end of April, but we had neat progress almost every day of the week and hope to keep the speed.

Update: PLEASE DO NOT HOTLINK PICTURES, THANKS!

Today three full levels of “World 4” were readjusted/rethemed, unfortunatly less than expected, but still better than nothing. Another funky thing… we work on a second ingame surprise ;)

* Operator is working on the music these days
* The GFX artist has delivered a cleaned up world 4
* Levels of world 4 should be adjusted by end of this week
* We are working on a “hidden” ingame surprise

[thUg] has been sick the past week, he’ll go on with GFX soon.
Our organizer had an accident (read more here: http://pdroms.de/news/9864/)
The rest of the team seems to be fine… ;)

Our all beloved coding machine from France did a great job the past days and the bugtracker has become slightly empty. Overall the progress speed concerning the code is excellent, while the graphics part slows down again (always the same…).

We’ll keep you guys updated! Promised ;)

To speak out straight, some of the screenshots in the screenshot section are pretty old and heavily outdated. For those who are interested in keeping the old pictures, make a backup of them, as they will be replaced in the next few days.

…everything is a little bit darker now, but with more features ;) The new theme also turns out to handle every previous entries 100% correctly, which is a nice thing :)

Today we thought to keep you updated about the ongoing bugfixes and improvements.

• First of all we have extended the time limit from 99 seconds per level to 120 seconds. A bunch of people who were able to play a preview complained about “lack of time” as they prefer exploring levels and collecting as many items as possible. Those 120 seconds should be now really more than enough for everyone, even for “explorers” and “diamond collectors”.
• We have two types of wall bricking now. As you know if Giana has her curly hairstyle she can destroy bricks – depending on her power there are two ways the brick disappears. If you have the energy-ball and you are bricking a wall, the brick get’s dissolved. As soon as you get stronger and have shooting ability, your “energy” level raises too and if you destroy a brick it splits into 4 parts as you know it from the preview videos. This is more like an eye candy and grant at least a little bit of difference during gameplay.
• Here comes something we have shameless stolen from “Super Mario” :) If you destroy a brick, you will get one extra score. This might be not a lot, but the main goal is not to destroy as many bricks as possible. Maybe as soon as the game is out some ppl might be worried about “who has the highest” score, so adding this ability to bricks, will be an important factor for score hunters. One point might be not a lot, but see everything in bigger dimensions. We might raise the amount of points you get from 1 to 5 or 10, but we are pretty unsure about that. After all you get 50 points just for squeezing an regular enemy ;)
• The whole intro stuff is done – Credits, a “special inspriation screen”, language selection and then it goes over to the titlescreen from where you can start the game – just finetuning left there.
• Last but not least, our coder fixed something which is of internal matter, the test mode shows everything animated now – which is a lot more comfortable when testing things ;)

Auf der deutschen Internetplattform studiVZ hat unser Beta-Tester Mulle die Gruppe Giana’s Return angelegt. studiVZ- und meinVZ-Nutzer können gern in dieser Gruppe beitreten, um aktuelle Reports vom Beta-Tester zu lesen oder auch Fragen zu stellen und Antworten zu erhalten.

(German only this time folks, sorry)

Earlier this morning (1am) [thUg] came up with a fixed tileset of World 1. It is looking a lot cleaner than the one we used before.

Some of you might think, why do you guys need to clean and detail pixel things?
It’s pretty easy to answer. The graphics are optimized for 320×200 pixel screens, this also keeps us the possibility open for a MS-DOS port. If we have “dirty” pixelgraphics and resize this to native solutions of other systems, things would look a bit rubbish. With this clean-pixel task we try to improve the quality for fullscreen stretching on any machine, while keeping the retro-style.

Due to the professional repixeling the amount of colors are also reduced a lot, which ensures we can save some RAM ;) This might not be relevant for new systems, but we want to have this game running on many beautiful (retro) systems such as GP2x, Amiga AGA, Dreamcast, Playstation Portable, etc…

Also some gossip about Giana’s Return GP32: As our music is available as .xm this willl eat lots of CPU speed, it might be a special difficult task to manage this game on a GP32, which does not mean it will not happen. We are currently discussing what to do and if it’s possible at all. Our musician op3rator took the old MOD’s and improved them and added more channels, which turned out in 8 channel .xm’s. His base music is basically available as .xm only now (specially the new composed tracks) and we wont give him more work with “backcomposing” to .mod. So either we can get Giana jumping on a GP32 or not… the chances are 50:50.

Also there are still thoughts which platform we should support first. Initially we have thought about a GP2x release, but it’s unsure at this time, if this will really happen first. There are severall reasons for this… we will just track the homebrew scene, follow comments and behaviours of users and our decision will be positive for the “most helpful and thankful” community.

With today we are one stop closer and many more steps will follow. While the tileset adjusting is not fully done, we are working on many “minor” engine improvements – specially eyecandies. Our genious french coder is working very hard to get the bugtracker empty and add improvements, which should work out really well for the final product.