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 The old posts have been archived, but are not yet imported to the new forums.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!