The developers at Black Forest Games are developing a game called Project Giana, a sequel to the classic Super Mario Bros clone, the Giana Sisters, which was released several decades ago.
Project Giana is being designed as a platform game which puts players in the role of Giana, a little girl stuck in a dream world which she can transition from 'cutesy' to 'punky'. Each of Giana's two forms have their own abilities and allow her to traverse through the environment and overcome obstacles which present themselves in the dream worlds.
But that’s only half of the story… whenever you transform, you’re actually warping the entire dream world! Cute Giana likes it spooky, thank you very much, and can lightly twirl over obstacles and enemies as long as the dream is sufficiently morbid. Flip to her candyland nightmare, and angry Punk Giana takes over, smashing anything fluffy that dares bar her way. The dream and nightmare worlds look, sound and behave differently, and morph between each other in real time, enabling all kinds of tricky maneuvers and bonus puzzly bits for secret areas.
Project Giana is currently being developed exclusively for the PC but its developers are running dry on funds. As such, they've put together a Kickstarter to fund the remainder of the game's development and hope to release it by October this year.
As an independently developed title, Black Forest Games retains full creative control over the game and its release without having to subject the game to 'grooming' by publishers for the sake of profit.
The game's original composer, Chris Hulsbeck returns to score Project Giana. Additionally, Machinae Supremacy will also be lending their remixes of his compositions to the game, and their heavy metal will play in the nightmare transition of the dream world.
Black Forest Games says that they'll be able to complete a basic version of the game for the $150,000 they're seeking on Kickstarter. They've an added stretch goal of $250,000 which will allow them to add more bosses, monsters and levels to the game.
If all goes well, Project Giana will be released on Steam and backers will receive a Steam key for their support.
They've certainly got mine.
