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!