News

The “Giana’s Return Team” has been pretty active the past days with plenty of postings. Here the most recent ones, along with a new screenshot (more on it’s homepage).

Quote:

Too many levels?
May 1st, 2008 by Gianas-Return Team

Our beta-tester Mulle complained recently, that 8 levels per world might be really too much. Our main intention was to stick with 6 levels only… Do you think 8 levels per world are too much?

56 Levels (not counting in the boss fights) might be indeed a little bit too much for a Jump’n’Run… Give us your opinion!

Engine on, Gear up!
April 30th, 2008 by Gianas-Return Team

Yesterday the storyline pictures were converted to look as good as possible in 240 colors only, as this will still allow us to use another additional 16 colors for a font, to display the story. We used the original material first (where pictures do have more than 1000 colors), but the SDL downscaling possibilities are rather limited and looked pretty poor. We hope that at least the storyline is optically in better shape now and will go on with more tasks soon!
PS: We might add a bunch of pictures of World 1 sometime tonight, but no promise on that.

Level up!
April 29th, 2008 by Gianas-Return Team

We decided to increase the amount of levels per world from 7 to 8, due to having two music tracks per world and we did not know how to split up in a fair way. So we have a new music track every 4 levels, along with seperate boss music.
If all our plans go well… we have a total amount of 56 instead 49 levels. This is more than enough for 2-3 hours of entertainment.

Lynx, webmaster of ndshb.com has taken his time to summarize the history of DS homebrew. This is quite an article and worths a read both if you’re a new comer or have enjoyed this scene for a while!

Thanks to http://www.drunkencoders.com for the news.

Stravingo updated his Sim City style game for Nintendo DS.

MobileScrobbler connects your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch with the Last.fm social music website. As you listen to music on your device, MobileScrobbler sends the title, artist, and album to the Last.fm website. Last.fm uses this information to suggest new music, new friends, concerts, and events based on the music you listen to.

Features:

Scrobble tracks as you listen on your iPhone / iPod touch
Queues songs for submission when offline and automatically submits them the next time you connect
Listen to Last.fm radio over EDGE or wifi
Tag songs as ‘love’ or ‘ban’
View album artwork and artist data for songs as you listen
View lyrics for the currently playing song
View upcoming concert events and add them to your calendar
All data is cached for offline viewing
Browse your friends and listen to their radio stations
Integrated with the iPhone / iPod Touch settings application
Multitouch gestures to ban, love, and skip tracks
View your top artists, top tracks, and top albums
Ban and love tracks from the Recent Tracks list
Browse a top listener’s profile by tapping their username
Display arbitrary track metadata by passing command line arguments -track, -artist, and -album

Changes:

Bugfix release for users unable to install on firmware jailbroken with ZiPhone 2.6

NightFox has released the final version of his puzzle game Colors. It plays similar to Columns, where you need to bring three identical colored gems, into a vertical or horizontal row, to let them disappear.

PSPSSH is a port of Dropbear, a small SSH2 Server
and Client running on a variety of POSIX-based platforms.

Changes:

– Fix IR keyboard issue with fw >= 3.80 for FAT PSP (thanks to Angelo)
– It has been tested sucessufully tested on:
. SLIM 3.90-m33 (thanks to Greg from psp-hacks)
. FAT 3.90-m33
. FAT 1.5 (addon for 3.90-m33)
– Increaze heap memory for fw3.x
– Code cleaning

PSPIRC is a basic IRC client for the PSP.

Changes:

– Fix IR keyboard issue with fw >= 3.80 for FAT PSP (thanks to Angelo)
– It has been tested sucessufully tested on:
. SLIM 3.90-m33 (thanks to Greg from psp-hacks)
. FAT 3.90-m33
. FAT 1.5 (addon for 3.90-m33)
– Fix issue with virtual keyboard (speed)

For those who are waiting for the “Ports Of Call” remake for Nintendo DS, here are some excellent work in progress news.

Quote:

This is a screen of the work in progress of the last event that needs to be included in Ports of Call DS. If you tell someone how such radar screen must respond then it sounds quiet easy but to make it react like intended is rather challenging. At the moment i am struggling with rotating the radar blobs around the center when the ship turns. I know how the math has to be done but translating that to code (and the right var types) isn’t as easy as it sounds. Atleast not for me.

See the progress site for the current standing.

Discussion: http://forum.palib.info/index.php?topic=4063.0

GouldFish is working on “Rodland” remake, there is no binary release yet.

Implemented:

Correct player 1 sprite
Collision engine that can be updated at run time.
Player can place a ladder.
Flowers are placed from the colision map and can be picked up by player for points.
pre set ladders work.
Custom font that includes player life counter.

A remake of the popular arcade made by Taito in 1986. It has only seven levels and two different types of enemies. It was ProD’s contribution to last years “Dream Build and Play”.