While we are spending our nights and days on the brand new Tiny and Big episode, the beta-demo is featured at its first game festival.
So if you are near Texas between the 23rd and 30th of September, you should consider to visit the ‘Fantastic Fest’ in South Lamar, Austin, play the Tiny and Big demo, watch some weird horror movies and have a beer with Bill Murray! Tiny and Big ‘Up that Mountain’ will be featured among 30 games in the ‘Fantastic Arcade Showcase’. Have a look at the full lineup here: http://www.fantasticfest.com/arcade/games
Hello hello, in the beginning of every game-production-plan there’s always a big load of concepts to be done. Every character, item, prop and bit of enviroment wants to be thought about and and at least sketched out in some way or another. Right now, we have been working on the vegetation of our upcoming next episode.
This is just a small portion of all the vegetation we have been trying to come up with. Maybe we’ll be willing to show much more on a later date, but schedules are tight at the moment!! As a little treat, here we have two renderings of the respective in game models. Neat!
Welcome to the Tiny and Big cinema! A good story based game needs cutscenes. That’s the reason why we are developing a scriptable scenario feature for Tiny and Big. Our goal is to provide an easy to handle script, which can be used by our stage directors who have little experience in programming. For example they would like to say: “Hey TINY, go to the position where the red marker is and be quick on the draw. BIG, you have to look scary and curse ‘What the heck …’, wait two seconds and then run away.”
Okay, this is maybe a bit too abstract, but I think you got the Idea. The scenario author should implement simple instructions with a minimum of programming language complexity. These instructions will be inserted into a task scheduler and will be executed at the desired time. Let’s take a look at a very simple example.
scenario.time = 2.0 -- Timestamp when to start with the following tasks
scenario:lookAtActor(Actor.TINY, 3.0) -- Camera shall look to TINY within 3 seconds
scenario:move(Actor.CAMERA, "nav_point_1", 3.0) -- Move camera to navigation point 1 within 3 seconds
scenario.time = 3.5
scenario:playAnimation(Actor.TINY, "arm") -- TINY shall play the arm animation
scenario.time = 6.0
scenario:cameraTarget(Actor.TINY) -- Sets TINY as fixed camera target
scenario.time = 7.0
scenario:move(Actor.CAMERA, "nav_point_2", 2.0) -- Move camera to navigation point 2 within 2 seconds
scenario.time = 8.5
scenario:playAnimation(Actor.TINY, "unarm") -- TINY shall play the unarm animation
scenario.time = 10.0
scenario:endCutscene() -- Ends cutscene
The following video shows the result of the scenario script. The cutscene begins once the red bars come down.
We had to take some time off after releasing the second beta of Tiny & Big – Up that Mountain, and didn’t find time to update the site since then. The reason why we’re so busy was mainly our quest for project funding. Now, after the first Tiny Telegraph was released, we’ll do the blogging thing regularly.
On the matter of financing, it’s not yet certain if we can land enough cash to work on the game as a company. But we definitely want to stay indie, with that being so hot and trendy at the moment…
The good news is that work on the first Tiny & Big episode is finally in full swing! And let me tell you, it feels really good to be productive again. We hope to have the first level playable by the end of the month.
Until then, here’s some preproduction artwork to give you an impression what the episode will look like:
Also, proper outdoor rucksack!
Greetings everyone! It`s been about time to throw a big THANKS on your screens, thanks for all the great feedback and mails you send us. This`ll all help us to make an awesome game! We took some quality time to rearrange our minds and restructure our little, five person black pants shack. And surely to regain our mighty game production pants!
Right now, we`ve already started working on the first Tiny&Big Episode, called “Grandfather`s Leftovers ”
From now on, we are going deliver this newsletter monthly. It will contain some work in progress shots, artworks and of course some comic strips are in the making right now. From now on the blog will be updated regularly.
So long, and thanks again guys, we`re doing our best to deliver the first episode of T&B round the end of this year. Stay tuned!
Until then, feel free to mail us anytime and tell us what you think our visit our site or blog.
Back in March, shortly after we released the Tiny & Big demo, we we’re contacted by the fine folks over at PC Gamer, the “World’s Number One PC Games Magazine”. With great joy, we learned that they were about to cover Tiny & Big in their Top Free Downloads column of the UK print edition. The issue in question (#214/ June) is out since May, and we finally managed to lay our grubby little hands on it. They granted us the section’s top spot with a full page of glorious high gloss goodness! The article paints a very favorable picture of the game, accompanied by an actual picture of the game! Did I mention it’s a freckin’ full page? “The demo is still a beta version but already feels like a revelation”, the author states, putting even our own twisted propaganda to shame. The whole gazette is stuffed with awesome (and in color), so we respectfully recommend an instant purchase. It’s not available in kiosks anymore, but you can still order it online.
Please visit if you have comments or problems running the game. We’ve documented some common bugs in the first beta, which might help you if you can’t get the sucker to run on your machine!
And one more Thank You! to all of you who sent mails and posted comments with bug reports, criticism and ideas! We really appreciate it, even though we are a bit overwhelmed at the moment with working on the second beta and all. It will be done soon, which will give us some breathing room to continue our work on the actual game.
