Our Beta-Tester Mulle had really a hardcore gaming session with Giana’s Return – he was able to solve the game within almost two hours and without the use of warp zones.

Do you think two hours are enough gaming material? :)

Screeny of PandoraToday had the pleasure to review one of the recent beta’s. So for those who doubt about the existence of the game, there is text and lot’s of screenshots!

http://today.openpandora.org/gianas-return/

Thanks to Jordi Aguila Jimenez, Giana’s Return is now available in spanish language :)

We still need a second pair of eyes with excellent spanish writing and expression skills, to finalize it. So please let us know via the blog and leave your correct e-mail adress, which can be only extracted by the administrator.

We had some time on our hands to make a small article about Giana’s Return on Wikipedia.

You may check it out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giana%27s_Return

We have some “spare time” left. The main work is now on the coders back and will take some time. So the project organizer is having time for one thing, which we basically had dropped already:

We are looking for translators for anything else beside german, french and english!

Keep in mind:
You will be credited for your translation so if your grammar sucks everyone will know whom to blame.
It’s only possible to use A-Z, we do not have special character support.
Top on our wish list is spanish!

Please reply back here, with your CORRECT eMail adress – so we can get back in touch with you.

Also it would be of advantage if you are native speaker and if you don’t have a problem, that a second native speaker is checking your work.

Thanks!

The past few days we have fixed more than 30 issues related to bugs and design. Bugfixing and testing will take few more days, so if the musicians don’t start to disappear last minute, we should be done by end of June.

Our main beta tester Mulle found severall smaller issues while having a longer testing session, once they are gone, we are one step closer to our goal.

There were also adjustments in the first two worlds, so we can offer a constant and permanent increasing difficulty to the gameplay.

It’s getting closer and closer to a release, but quality will still require time. We are aware, that there is a group of people who check back every day and desperatly wait for news.

We have finalized the leveledesign COMPLETLY. We are currently checking back, if there are any minor design mistakes (we are all human) so we can consider it also perfect and ready for everyone to play.

Few days ago we had a question about warp zones, which did not bring too much feedback. Let us tell you, how we solved the issue. We have spread warp zones all over the levels. They usually will require you to jump to unusual places or use enemies as trampoline, so don’t think it will be a piece of cake to find. As it would be a bad idea to spoil the fun before it even started, we can just assure you, that it will be hard to spot all of them.

Beside level testing, we try to do the rest of the graphics work and also add a few eye candies here and there.

Few of the hidden features are an oldschool style trainer menue and a hidden greeting part. More hidden goodies will be added soon.

Our GP2x WIZ porting guy will be off for a few days, so after he is back, we should have done most of our minor tasks and release the game to the public.

We have often told a release date, if someone would ask us right now, we probably would point at June (plus/minus two months).

As you all can see… we are still working hard!

Flavor managed to hunt down a slowdown, related to SDL. Now everything runs SMOOTH as it should (on Wiz).

Flavor, our GP2x and Wiz porter, has made a sweet video of Giana’s Return running on the Wiz. It’s for now pretty slow, as it’s a straight out of the box compile, without optimizing. But hey… it works! :)