tinyBuild’s ridiculous action-adventure platformer began its life as a browser based game over on Newgrounds way back in 2011. Following its success, the creator, Tom Brien, started work trying to expand it and bring it to Steam and eventually onto consoles. The resulting Kickstarter for this ended up being one of the first video game projects to achieve success. That’s when the problems started, upon release it was immediately apparent that the game was severely flawed and frustrating, a far cry from the goofy time travel weirdness initially promised.
The game went from challenging and straight into the realms of impossible earning it some pretty harsh criticism, that even its creators admit to, “Neither Tom Brien or I — the pair who started tinyBuild four years ago — know how to code properly. We can do rapid prototyping, but we’re in no way professional programmers. This is one of the main reasons why the original release of No Time to Explain sucked,” Alex Nichiporchik explained via tinyBuild’s official blog.
Continuing to detail the long road to complication, Nichiporchik spoke of how offers of partnerships began to arise, particularly from BUKA Entertainment, a publisher based in Russia, which promised a route to getting onto Steam, “This is 2011 we are talking about. There was no Steam Greenlight. If you released a game on Steam in 2011, odds are you would do really well.”
This lead to a financial commitment from BUKA and the tinyBuild team started hammering out the game, but halfway through the project and ready to hire a developer, the promised advance still hadn’t arrived. BUKA finally responded to their worried inquires stating that they were pulling finance of all indie games, theirs included.
The team was faced with the decision to either lose everything or release the game with a hack job codebase as is and hope to stabilize it as they went. That’s when Steam Greenlight appeared on the scene. Fusing together all the pieces they had, No Time to Explain morphed into an ActionScript 2 disaster that whimpered along. The game was raked over in the coals by reviewers but still managed to hit the mark with YouTubers and the rise of game vlogging, something that would help to salvage the game.
No Time to Explain as it was meant to be was a lesson in lol wut and promised all the charm and challenge of games like Super Meat Boy or ‘Splosion Man and hopefully we’ll now get to enjoy it in its new form as it has been completely remastered and multiplayer has been added, the upgrade is free to those who owned the original and $15 for those who don’t.
