[In this extended interview, first published as an abridged article in the June/July issue of Game Developer magazine, Black Pants Game Studio looks back on the development of its physics-based student project Tiny and Big.]
2011 IGF finalist Tiny and Big combines 3D platforming with physics-based sandbox destruction, allowing players to slice and re-shape the landscape using tools including a long-range grappling hook and a high-powered laser. The Kassel, Germany-based team released a prototype in 2010, and is now working on a new, full-featured version titled Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers.
Tell me about the team's approach to design for Tiny and Big. What process did you use-prototyping? Paper sketches?
Florian Grolig, Sebastian Stamm (game designer and artist): Designing game mechanics is an iterative process, usually starting with an idea roughly sketched on paper to illustrate it to the team. Based on that sketch we directly create a first prototype, to check if the basic idea actually works. Keeping the concept consistent and essential turns out to be the major challenge. Many features we were excited about or that were requested by people who played the demo didn't make it into the game, because they would have weakened the core mechanism.
To catch the mood and structure of our levels, we create concept artworks of the scenery and the key elements of each level. We simultaneously start to create sketches of the challenges and puzzles. Both the puzzles and environment pieces are roughly modeled and playtested in the game. Often puzzles that were supposedly fun as a sketch turned out to be too easy, or more often too hard or simply too abstract when you actually play them. During the whole process of making the game, we allow ourselves a lot of room for testing and rearranging the environment and the puzzles, to eventually get to a point where every level has its own theme and feeling. We start producing effects and textures very early as well, to test how they fit into the whole game experience as soon as possible.
The game runs on your team's own custom engine, correct? Why did you choose to develop your own engine rather than use things like Torque or Unity?
Johannes Spohr (engine lead): Yes, that's correct, we developed the engine and tools from scratch. The three programmers among us were enthusiastic about game development since back when they started their CS degree, or even earlier. The Scape Engine was born out of a few computer graphics projects, which were attended mainly because of their relevance to 3D games. With time, more and more code was added as more ambitious projects were pursued. A few successful courses and less successful, unfinished games later, we had a nice game programming tool-set which allowed us to rapidly develop 3D games. The driving force behind all the DIY effort was very basic, yet irresistible: fun!
Another factor was that we simply had a lot of time on our hands back when we were first-year students. We learned a lot about working on large projects when developing the engine, probably more than we ever could when taking on any of the educational offers from university.
We never considered using a more proven and stable engine when we started Tiny & Big, because we knew what our own creation was capable of. It has the advantage that we can customize it exactly to our liking, as we are familiar with every nook and cranny inside of it. Perhaps we are a bit locked in to our own technology, but looking back today it may have been the best decision we never made.
What led you to the decision to make a short demo for the game before making the Grandpa's Leftovers chapter?
Christian Niemand (engine programmer): It actually happened the other way around, we decided to make the Grandpa's Leftovers chapter after releasing the short demo Up that Mountain. When our team came together and we started development, we didn't know each other very well at first, and we had no idea what type of game we would like to do and where the project would end up. Florian's vision was to create a game with an entirely destructible environment and we discussed several approaches. We knew that there were other games which focused on the same idea, so we experimented with different implementations and the slicing mechanic turned out to be the most promising.
When the demo hit 10,000 downloads during the first month after release, we were quite surprised. This gave us motivation to go on with Tiny and Big and we immediately started working on the first episode.
