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

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!

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!

Here’s some new updates for you!

We’ve spent the last 3 or 4 weeks coming up with a clear concept and basic rules of how the environment should look like, especially the rocks. It’s been some pretty mind-twisting weeks.

With Tiny&Big being a physics puzzler, it’s pretty important to get a direct grip on every form in the game. Means, if I cut stone, it should be pretty simple for me to tell which direction it’s gonna fall. Otherwise, it would be rather hard to have any linear puzzle quests in the game. And of course, the stones, cactuses, statues and everything else had to fit in Tiny’s crudely drawn world.

To put things short, here’s our fine, little, sandwich inspired rock, that’s gonna be the styleguide for everything else we put in that forsaken desert! All that testing of rocks (!) finally paid off.

I’ve also added some concepts by crafty Dr. Draude, who’s doing most of the environment sketches and concepts for Tiny&Big.

Adios and bye!

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

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!