The guys at Giana’s Return are back with very interesting news:

Quote:

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’s 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.

http://www.gianas-return.de/