Hey everyone!
We’ve landed the Pantsjet and arrived safely at the GDC in San Francisco.
After wrestling the monster of crunch for the last few weeks, we’re proud to showcase the first couple of levels from Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers exclusively at our booth at the IGF pavilion.
It’s located at HALL B / Expo Hall (Moscone South), be sure to pay us a visit and slice some stones…
We’re looking forward to meet you there!
Regards and Later,
Black Pants
P.S.: here’s footage!

Having stomached the initial (pleasant) shock that was our nomination for the IGF Student Showcase, it’s up to me to write some words about it. It feels awesome, and we really appreciate the, well, appreciation of the IGF jury. That nomination hit us like a big comet of love, right in the metaphorical balls! I remember waking up to a tweet from someone saying “Congrats @tinyandbig for Student Showcase winner at Indie Games Festival”, and instantly my heart stopped to become a small, wrinkled ball of dry matter, just as somebody would feel when exposed to super-sonic speeds, or baby kittens. The rest of the day, all of us wandered around with the biggest smiles anatomically possible for the average face.

We had actually planned to enter Tiny & Big into the student competition back in 2009. We missed that deadline by about 5 months, but released a demo as a proof of concept that really worked, and the additional efforts paid off. There are still many of you indie enthusiasts which download and play that demo every day. To you, we are incredibly thankful, and all those who sent in feedback and words of encouragement deserve our utmost respect!

Even though the last few weeks have been quiet ones around this place, a lot was going on behind the scenes. For one, the site has received a complete overhaul (regular visitors will have noticed), and is now a big pile of awesome. The guys behind that operation are Stamm, the grand master of all things pixelated, and Sven Rogge, tamer of the page template. You look at it, right now.

We exchanged our board, too, as the old software had major annoyances. The old posts have been archived, but are not yet imported to the new forums. Please re-register if you had an account on the old board, sorry for the inconvenience!

Besides that, when not paralyzed by the Holidays, our team worked on the Up that Volcano demo, and we silently uploaded a new build two days ago. It comes with lots of bug-fixing and gameplay-tuning, so check it out for the sake of checking out. Maybe the bug that annoyed the whoopsies out of you is now gone for good!

Some of you may have heard us promise a demo of Grandpa’s Leftovers, the first full game in the Tiny & Big saga. So, here’s the bad news: we decided to postpone that demo until the full game is in a more refined stage, i.e. we don’t want the release date of the final version to be too far apart from the demo. This way, everyone who finishes the demo will be able to pre-order the game right after! Until then, have fun with the new demo release, I hear it might have that awesome gimmick seen in the trailer for Grandpa’s Leftovers!

The complete list of changes:

• • Improved controls, once again
• • Redesigned some of the more annoying puzzles
• • More robust physics
• • Optimized for dual core CPUs
• • Lots of special FX, like particles and depth-of-field
• • Fixed audio problems
• • 3D audio where available
• • Shorter loading times
• • Requires less memory
• • Cg toolkit now included on Linux
• • Runs faster on older graphics cards that don’t support clip planes in hardware
  (e.g. MacBooks with ATI chips)
• • Middle mouse button for fun and profit!

To go along with our redesign post, here’s a final character sheet of Tiny in bloom and with equipment loaded. The little mugger has a size of 5.24 real human feet and a shoe size of 11(as a nitty-gritty character, he prefers Velcro® fastener on his footwear). Unless stolen, he normally wears one specific pair of underwear and likes his hairdo to be short. Skin tone is a healthy dark grey. Due to his carefully chosen way of life, you can see his perfectly ball-shaped belly when you look at him in profile.

Nevertheless, he’s still good at walking fast and jumping up high. And of course, although his body shape and general attitude towards fitness don’t suggest it, he’s quite proficient at pushing and shoving huge amounts of boulders, rocks and whichever environmental pieces come along.

Tiny likes to listen to music, though apparently nature didn’t give him regular ears. So just imagine his head as a swinging membrane of high-fidelious sound reception. Somehow…

Anyways, enjoy the sheet,
Greetings and Regards,

Stamm

If interested in more private details of Tiny, write here: mail(a)tinyandbig.com

Since our first release of the beta of Tiny and Big: Up that Mountain, we always wanted to advance Tiny’s character design for the final game episode Grandpa’s Leftovers. It’s been about time to share the final re-design of Tiny, so here’s some exclusive renderings for you.

We tweaked some of Tiny’s proportions, gave him a teeth makeover, shed some more dirt on his feet and added a bucket full of valuable gadgetery to survive the desert: (imagine the following lines read by a loud commercial speaker with a slight german accent)

We gave Tiny a new tool, to make the whole shoving and moving of rocks and boulders even more comfortable.

The HANDMADE ROCKET TM! Made from firebeans, old packaging material and a collector’s item toy robot, the rocket can be shot at any matter in your way to shove it around. Of course even from a longer distance.

Tiny’s advising collegue and mentor, the talking RUCKSACK RADIO TM is now equipped with a fully functional tape slot. It allows Tiny to play rarest collector’s music tapes he finds during his journey. Once you found one, you can listen to it anytime, anywhere. To put it short, Tiny carries his own portable boombox. And what’s better than bringing and selecting your own soundtrack while slicing environment.

To save his eyes, Tiny brings a useful, yet still fashionable pair of glasses to the desert. THE REALITY BOY TM, once activated, makes life and rock surveillance in an unknown terrain much easier. This limited version is checkered, grey and red.

Last but not least, Tiny’s now a proud owner of the BAG OF SACK TM, a little brown pouch attached to his belt. A warm and cozy place to store the treasures he discovers on his way, like musictapes and rather exciting stones…

Of course, Tiny is still accompanied by his mighty raycutting tool and his trusty grappling hook.

So have fun digesting the complete, all new & fresh Tiny, Enjoy those new inventions,
Stay tuned, regards,

Stamm

P.S.: Support environment deconstruction and vote for us at the Indie of the Year competition!
VOTE HERE!

Thanks to you, Tiny and Big is now one of the top 100 nominated games for the Indie of the Year Awards! And once again, we are asking for your kind support by voting in the final round to push Tiny and Big as high as possible. You can vote by clicking here, go to the upcoming category and open the platformer register, where you will find Tiny and Big. And please remember, if you are a registered user, your vote has more weight!

We’ll see how far we can go, but we are already truly excited to have made it into the top 100. A few days ago, we didn’t expect that we had any chance at all, but you’ve proven that black can be white… So thanks a lot for believing in us! With this kind of support, we are even more dedicated to create the best Tiny and Big episode the world has ever seen…

Oh yeah, and while you’re at it, peek around to see some of the competition. There are a lot of exceptional games and highly motivated teams, all deserving our utmost respect! So please let me take the opportunity to send greetings to all those awesome indie teams out there! See you guys around!

Cheers

We were pretty much overwhelmed by the tons of spiffy feedback we received regarding our new trailer. The reponses have been a huge motivational boost to make a unique game which helps us through the tough phase of releasing the next version!!!

The new release is coming in the next few weeks. Meanwhile there is an older release in the download section.

To get notified about the new release, please subscribe to our newsletter or subscribe via RSS. And feel free to send us more feedback and suggestions any time :-D

Regards, Sys

Time for a summary of what’s going on right now, right here at The Pantsagon!

Let’s start a couple of months back, just after we released the demo of Tiny & Big. We sat together joyfully, as we just had received buckets of great feedback on the game. And although we’d just spent all our energy on the demo, we naturally already thought about production of the final game, and just how awesome it would be, and that we would complete it by the end of the year. Our team was mostly students of the University of Kassel, so we decided to enter the student competition at the Independent Games Festival.

But when it became clear that we would need almost a year to complete the whole game, a major point was thrown into discussion – “how are we gonna get paid, Sir?”, one of the grungy looking artists said with a low voice, and with fear of starvation chiseled into his innocent little artist-face. All went quiet. We had no idea.

Actually, of course we all had lots of ideas, ranging from “let’s build an MMO where the users build the content and pay us for it!”, or “preorders! preorders! dammit!”, to “work hard and honestly, and the payment will be ours.”

As always, the best option seemed just to collect money for no apparent service in return, also known as acquiring funding. Luckily for us, we can consider ourselves honored to work with Prof. Albert Zündorf, who agreed to be our project mentor. With his expertise, we were confident enough that we could score some serious funding. However, once we started our venture into the world of funding applications, development on Tiny & Big lay almost still. We used the time to stabilize the code and improve performance, but there was little to no content added to the game for weeks.

Production finally proceeded, but some team members had to work day jobs to sustain a living, and this slowed down the process considerably. In a small team, one missing person can completely disrupt your workflow. You can probably imagine how great we felt when we were eventually notified that our application was granted, and we all could work full-time on the project!

With this boost in employee satisfaction, we plunged into production, trying to put as much into the IGF entry as possible with the time left. In the end, we managed to produce a polished tutorial level (see screenshot), which you can hopefully check out for yourself soon! Expected release date for the new beta is some time next month, so make sure to check back or follow us on Twitter or RSS. And if you want to help, please take a moment to register and vote for us at Indie DB for Indie of the Year. Thanks, everyone!

After a long lasting battle and almost endless weeks and months between hope and fear, finally a happy end. We ensured funding for the next twelve months, as the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) believes in us! From now on the following logos will accompany us on every step we’ll make as long as the funding lasts…

However, with big bags of cash comes great responsibility. Naturally, the first thing is making a nerdy and totally awesome computer game. And besides the development of Tiny and Big within this time frame we have to elaborate a nice business plan. But with our heads full of strategic wisdom and encouraged by YOUR support we feel ready to lift an unique and individual game studio here in the center of Germany. So stay tuned… watch our progress and feel free to contact us for sharing your ideas or ask any kind of questions. It’s the only way you can ever find out what size Tiny’s pants are. And it’s not medium.

Greetings, everyone out there! Our little delegacy of three is back from London. Our heads are still swirling from all the input we got, but nevertheless, it felt good to take some days off from the heavy production phase we’re in right now…

First of all, our slot was great. The folks running the Indie Games Arcade supplied us with a nice set of two machines to show our little demo of Tiny and Big. It was great to meet some comrades from the English indie scene, like the guys from Honeyslug, who put a pretty nifty looking game called Hohokum to the monitors. Special mention goes to the evening we spent at the King William IV. We reached that drinkery after a long journey through most of London, had a Show and Yell, which was hilarious, the ale splendid.

So long,
thanks for all the great feedback we received from everyone!

A quick reminder: Tiny&Big – Up that Mountain! is featured in the Fantastic Arcade Showcase this weekend (we blogged about it before).

While this is a really awesome thing for us, there is something which makes us feel even more awesome: the game has been selected for the Indie Games Arcade section of next week’s Eurogamer Expo 2010 in London! Can you say…awesome??!!

For this event, we’re flying some of our best men over to the British Empire: humble Gentlemen, Mr. Stamm and Mr. Sys, will be at the booth to give you a hands-on experience! And you can play the game, too.

So we hope to meet you between October 1st and 3rd, at The Brompton Hall, London. Good times!