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!

We asked earlier this month which platform to be servered first, GP2x or PSP. The result is pretty clear and GP2x is far ahead.

The community made a choice and the community will get what they want! Let’s look forward for end of December!

Widdy ( http://www.widdy.de ) a smart guy from Bavaria / Germany and member of a bunch of demogroups has started to conduct a study if a GBA version of Giana’s Return would be doable and to all our surprise the chance is pretty high.

He already has a platform engine which is highly adjusted to the GBA hardware so he just needs to push in the Giana’s Return elements and also the appropriated stuff around.

As the GBA is tile wise limited in color, he has to repixel few parts. The music we use for Giana’s Return is .XM, which can’t be handled on a GBA without too much CPU use, BUT am-fm, our new music support guy will rearrange things, so even .MOD’s will sound fine.

Let’s see how this GBA attempt will end!

Okay, here we go again for another status update.

Our main musician Alexander Oldemeier (op3rator) moved over to the UK and is limited in time now, also he does not have any internet at home yet, which makes communication quite difficult. As result of his lack of time he now has support from David Wuttke (am-fm). Both will be finalizing the music the next days. Don’t worry about style differences, there are almost none :) op3rator and am-fm both create excellent chipmusic tracks.

The graphics are comming along, we managed to put Adam Karol (Wizard) back in charge, who already drew the marvellous boss graphics – which everyone of you can enjoy once you manage to reach the end of each of the seven worlds.

While the final graphics are in progress, the level design is put on hold, but this is just a minor part which is done in one or two weekends.

Our coder, who will still stay unnamed for now, is a bit busy at his regular job, but he is motivated to keep on working  while having deadline stress.

The coding of the first two bosses are 100% done and approved by our beta tester Mulle. The next three ones are close of beeing completed and will await our beta tester then.

As you can see everything is going smooth… so we look forward to have a release at 29th or 30th December 2008 .

Currently we are negotiating if we should release for GP2x or PSP first, but that will probably depend on the demand.

After the v0.99 version has been released, we will rely on YOU, the user, to send us bug reports. Once the game is considered as beeing fine and bugfree, we start to port over to other systems such as Dreamcast, Pandora, Wiz and whatever other platforms we can get our hands on.

At the end of November we will send another test version for verification to the guy we all love and who holds the copyright on the trademark name “The Great Giana Sisters” for pre approval. After all he should see everything before anyone else.

Well lets start the big flamewar now… GP2x or PSP?

It’s time for a small and tiny status update.

Things are going on in a wonderful way – we have decided the release date, but wont make it public.

Music is almost complete, graphics are almost complete, levels are almost complete, we basically just have to hack the end bosses of each world together, which requires hardcoding and do some more excessive beta testing.

What we can tell, the game will be out in very late 2008 :)

Well here comes the biggest delay of this year. Our project organizer is going on longtime vacation.

Actually no one need to worry, because he took all the Giana files with him :)

The status news here on this page will be stalled until end of November, unless other staff members beside the organizer post on their own!

Our coder made quite a progress for the PSP version.

Earlier this day he had to fight with memory issues, but he managed to sort out those during the day. Now it’s quite late and we DO HAVE a working PSP version, but it has graphics glitches, minor transparency issues and is a bit slow. Also the controls seem too sensitive for an analogue stick and completly wrong for digital cross usage.

We keep you guys updated!
(at least for the next few days before our organizer and “blog udpater” rushes out for a longtime vacation).

Our coder is adjusting the development code so we can get the PSP port done in almost no time :) He done lots of progress the past days in this field…

Keeping the code portable and having a coder capable of keeping things portable is a true pleasure! Of course this might not the best for hard coded speed optimizations, but we want to serve as many systems as possible.

We also have an estaminated release date, but we’ll keep it back, till we are sure we can hold it :)