News from Giana's Return

[Maturion]

Giana's Return team has updated their blog again. They informed us about bugfixes and they also said that they have created a group called "Giana's Return" on the German social network "StudiVZ" ("meinVZ"). You can talk to the beta testers there. To all Germans here: Join this group.

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

Source: http://www.gianas-return.de/?p=135 and http://www.gianas-return.de/?p=136

[beetroot bertie]

Nice to hear this is coming on nicely. Can't wait to see how much it's improved from the previous release (which was cool anyway).

I liked the password system for the levels as it gave it that proper retro feel.