Both of our music artists, Alexander Oldemeier and David Wuttke, have sent in their part of the game music. We consider the sound track as 99% completed.

We’ve got mail from Spellbound today… we can’t go too much into detail but basically they want to see a current beta version and then decide which platforms we can serve, without having any kind of conflicts.

We see this as positve sign, they really care about us :) Otherwise they would have probably just ignored us.

Thanks Mr. S for taking time for us! It’s much appreciated!

… but they wont fall down or disappear ;)

One of the more obscure bugs which came with the fresh beta version :D At least we had a good laugh ;)

Dear “Coder” :)

You are doing a great job at the moment and the team appreciates the time you spend in finetuning things… keep it going and we will rock the “release” party :)

Merci bocu!

@for the rest: guess the nationality of our coder :) – too bad it’s so obvious now :D

We got a brandnew graphics set for World 6, which repelaced the older one we had – and it’s thousand percent worth it. Level 1 of World 6 has been redesigned and finalized today, but we are pretty unsure if it’s too difficult or not. Let’s see what our betatester is telling us! Screenshots will follow some time…

Widdy is pretty restless these days, not does he have a fulltime job, no he is also continously working on the GBA version of Giana’s Return which is actually a fully from zero recoded engine.

In yesterdays WIP built Giana was able to collect diamonds and as the GBA screen resolution is a bit smaller than what it was originally developed for, Giana has a sort of spy look, allowing her to check things without actually moving somewhere.

We’ll keep you updated :D

We are currently experimenting with “new” fonts as we thought the old ones are ugly. Also the fifth boss is close to completion, just minor attacks are left to integrate.

It’s pretty amazing what Widdy did with his “study”. Giana’s Return GBA is already pretty far.

For now the GBA version does the following:
* Tile collision
* Supports all three jump types and Giana is walking (animated)
* Background
* Plays music in the background

Everyone knows the Nintendo DS remake will be out soon, so do we. We wrote an E-Mail to our contact person at Spellbound yesterday to get a few answers – but there is no response yet. Basically we will limit ourself to releases on economical dead systems such as Dreamcast, GP32 and similar and to systems with no economical relevance such as the GP2x, Wiz and Pandora.

It’s more than obvious that people wont see Giana’s Return in the near future on the Nintendo DS – you better buy the commercial game and support the development of Spellbound and Bitfield :) Only a minority of the people out there would be able to run a Nintendo DS version anyway, as you need specific hardware for this.

On Yotube we have found a video of the official sequel, which can be seen here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxsVV9a5J9I – you may compare this to our stuff located here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNWDl9jZjwg

kedo, staff member at http://www.pdroms.de, gave us information about the recent PC Action “Classic Gaming” special 01/2009 article where they presented the official sequel of The Great Giana Sisters. Up to a specific point we knew that something like this was in the works, specially for the Nintendo DS platform.

The screenshots of the official sequel are impressing and the guys at Bitfield for sure did a great job. This imense “boost” of graphics and the nice style is also making a bit jelaus, we must admit :) Probably we need to pimp the graphics a bit again to make it more worthy. It’s not like we want to compete with a commercial product now, but polishing never harmed.

Now we are having a more or less tiny dilemma,  because we want to bring multi platform fun – a Nintendo DS version of Giana’s Return is impossible now as there would be an economical confilct and we are not interested in such a situation.

If we really want to be “independent” we probably must drop the name “Giana’s Return” to be free from outside influences. As the material is all ours, beside the used trademark, we will decide within the team how to go on.

A thing which goes close to our heart and which should be mentioned here:

Joachim Hesse, who works for PC Action, is a long time supporter of Giana’s Return. Recently his employee Computec has kicked him along with another guy. We are very thankful to Joachim for his support which can be also seen if you grab the magazine above. He mentioned Giana’s Return even it’s not out yet and he still believes in us. Considering he was one of the main heads of the german magazine PC Action and he is not with us anymore, I would be more than happy if you could sing up at this petition to get his job back. I believe he is doing it well as he supports also the small ones, just like us. If you want to help getting his job back please sign this petition: [http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/pcaction/index.html] – A “PC Action” without him and his collegue Harald would be sad anyway. I believe the quality will drop dramatically.

Update:

It seems Jo’s email account has been assimilated and he also does not show up as active member at the PC Action webboards. Jo if you read these lines, please get in touch with us. Thanks!