A Coffee Break with: Pins, tiny & Tall: Gleipnir

GOFIG_news
Sep 5, 2018 · 9 min read

Surrounded since childhood by his parents’ comic books, tiny Pins developed a passion for telling stories through drawing as soon as he could hold a pen.
Years later, Tall Pins learned to master his craft in art schools, with a detour in corporate marketing.

His comics strips (always funny, often surreal) featuring the beloved duo tiny&Tall have acquired quite the fanbase over the years.With no prior knowledge in game making but many gaming hours clocked in, Pins has spent the last 4 years developing by himself a grand story featuring the Laurel & Hardy of absurd & pop culture.

tiny&Tall: Gleipnir, the first game in this hilarious universe, is already out on PC!

Hi Pins! Welcome to our Coffee Break!
First game out, congratulations! What made you jump the gap between making comics and developping a video game?

Hello and thanks for inviting me!

Thank you! I was still in art school when I started to play with the idea of developping a game. It all comes from a comment I’ve heard a few times. People kept telling me the background of my comic panels looked like old point’n’clicks, which was no surprise: I’m a huge fan of all LucasArt games.
So I thought it would be fun to just try and make one. And… that’s it!
The actual project file has been the very same since that moment.
I have yet to decide which way I’ll end up going with, being a comic artist or a game author, but for now, it seems I don’t really need to commit to a particular choice.

You had no experience in video games development beforehand, and tiny&Tall: Gleipnir is far far away from a simple first game. The task never felt too big?

Oh yes, it did. It still does. It was probably too much! There’s nothing too technically daunting with developing an adventure game, particularly when you’re using a well-maintained engine with a lively community, but the sheer mass of assets, musics, texts, translation work to produce did feel very intimidating. I guess what allowed me to do it is that I had no idea how hard it would be or just how much… stuff I needed to create. The process was very anarchic and I had to do a lot of tidying later in the development. I mean, I’ve been thinking about gathering the pieces for an art book someday, and to be honest, a lot of that is going to be cryptic Post-it notes! However, I feel much more confident now for future projects.

tiny&Tall: Gleipnir uses Visionaire Studio. Why did you favor that engine instead of another?

Visionaire is an easy-to-use engine. It also benefits from a community that’s always ready to help, give advice or opinions. I tried various engines at the very beginning of the project, but I tried not to focus too much on the tools but rather on the contents. I feel like at some point you end up looking for an engine that will perfectly fit your vision in every aspect, and of course, you will never find it. So I locked my choice pretty early. Thankfully, I never felt the engine going against my ideas. There were a few rough corners where I had to raise my voice, but it did what I needed it to do!

Most often, newcomers in indie games have a hard time marketing their games, as it is a job of its own. Did your past experiences in corporate marketing help you on that matter?

Under duress, I might begrudgingly concede that they did.
It really is a full-time job. I think that if it seems to be an afterthought for some indie games, it’s mostly because, as theses developers have to do everything themselves, they do it smartly. They develop their game piece by piece, first the mechanics, the assets, etc. Then, once done, they look at the marketing and they’re like “Alright, now my next task is: to sell that game I’ve made”.

To me, the problem is that marketing must be an ongoing process almost from the very beginning. As soon as it looked like I was going to be able to develop a game and market it, I started to draw comic strips on Twitter, featuring the main characters of the game. They soon got some momentum, I even had a book published with these strips, and I think it really helped with the marketing.
I might be completely wrong on this, of course. I still don’t think I did enough. Admittedly, it’s never enough, but if I have had more time I would have published my strips on more platforms. There’s unfortunately only a very finite amount of time you can allocate to each task on such a project.
Oh, well!

tiny&Tall are bite-sized comics strips. While some have an ongoing narrative, the strips are mostly self-sufficient.
But tiny&Tall: Gleipnir is a fully fleshed story! Was breaking your usual frame something you were really looking forward to, or on the contrary a difficult task?

I usually present things like this: t&T: Gleipnir (t&T stands for tiny and Tall, hence the small t and the big T!) is a 3 to 4 hours long strip.
I’ve been eager to go beyond three cases. I used to do 6 cases strips when I had more time. It was very, very tough for me to constrain to three cases, I like wordy jokes, I like walls of text! These strips have helped me a great deal to be more concise, less verbose. It might have helped with the game’s writing in the end!

The game is actually an adaptation of a comic (included in game as an unlockable extra). There are a few full length t&T adventures in existence, most of them can’t be shown yet though. I’ve been preparing another long story, this time much more historical, for when I’m done with the legend of Gleipnir!

tiny&Tall: Gleipnir is beautifully animated; while you obviously got illustrating talents, animation is a beast of its own. Alike programmation, did you learn motion softwares as you tackled development?

Thank you!

The very first thing I did for the game was a walk cycle for tiny. It took me a while, I used a lot of references, but it was the perfect jumpstart. I think that if you can do a convincing walk cycle, you can animate a lot of things. I had friends in the animation course back in art school and I sometimes took a walk down to their den. They were dishevelled and with dark circles under their eyes, some sort of underground hell, but on their screens and in their sketchbooks, things were moving. That’s always been fascinating to me, but I had never really tried it before the game. From these friends in animation, I got a few notions, mostly the importance of keyframes. It’s actually really fun to design attitude-filled keyframes. The real problem with 2D animation (and most likely 3D too, but I don’t know anything about that one) I think is just how time-consuming it is. I work fairly fast, but the animation is probably what took me the longest on this project.

Did seeing your two adorable characters in motion give you further ideas -like, for example, cartoons?

It did! I’ve had a few comic strip that didn’t really work, that confused people, and that really frustrates me. Sometimes, it’s because the cultural reference I’m basing the joke on just doesn’t resonate with people, but sometimes it’s just that… the joke can’t be told as a comic. It would however work as an animated short… I’ve been playing with that idea for a while now, and I have drafted some storyboards. When I have more free time…

In retrospect, what was the most difficult part in this project, the one that made you think “Why am I doing this again?”?

Haha, every part made me say this, at some point!

I do remember trying to solve coding issues, and going “why do I inflict this on myself? I’m an artist, I can’t code!” It was particularly frustrating as the only thing holding me back was my own ignorance. There wasn’t a physical, real reason I could not get through it, it was just something very intellectual, very logic-based, and I hated it. But I wouldn’t say coding was my least favorite part, though, I discovered just how satisfying it can feel when it works like it should.

An animation that just doesn’t flow properly can do that, too. When the idea in your head was much more static that you thought, and translating it to a sequence of images just doesn’t work. Then, you can see all the intermediate frames, all the new frames you’re going to have to draw and it just feels so defeating. I found that, in these moments, it is sometimes best to just get rid of everything, do something else and start over later. That’s the main advantage of doing everything alone! Anytime the animation makes me regret I ever picked up a pencil, I can go and make some music for the game and it will still be useful!

Any advices to your fellow indie developpers, or those yet to be?

I guess my main advice would be to just start working. Not to focus on the tools too much. Most of my game was made with tragically outdated software & hardware. My Wacom has to be 10 years old and is falling apart (I still love it dearly). Its cover is actually taped shut so my stupid, sweaty hand stops making it lift like Marilyn’s skirt everytime I facepalm at my own drawings.

I would also advise them to start working on things that will be useful no matter the engine, if they haven’t locked their choice yet. Most of the assets for the first level of my game were made before I settled on the Visionaire engine. You can do a lot of things right now for your game and it will all be useful, regardless of your skill in any of these tasks.

What can tiny&Tall fans can expect in the future?

I will be working on the Mac & Linux adaptation as soon as I can, but also, of course, on the Part 2 of Gleipnir. I have actually started doing some concept arts and background paintings for some scenes, the scenario is pretty much well-defined from here to the end of the story. There will also be another book coming later, a follow-up to the first collected strips.

I would very much enjoy for the first book to be released in English at some point!

Bonus question: Coffee, tea, or beer? ☕🍵🍺?

I’m very, very sorry as this interview is, after all, called “Coffee Break”, but I’m going to have to go with tea. Smoky black tea all the way — I’m an avid scotch enthusiast!

tiny&Tall: Gleipnir is out today on PC, and you can buy it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/431280/tiny__Tall_Gleipnir/
You can read more of Pins’ hilarious comics on his twitter account @chance_meeting or on @tinyettall.

For you french-speaking readers, you can get his first book through his publisher or your usual resellers: http://librairie.lapin.org/librairie/311-tiny-tall-9782377540037-9782377540037.html

And finally, follow us on @GOFIG_news for more indie games news ;)

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