When asked what the most impressive and enjoyable part of playing a game is, a developer will often answer with a favourite level, character, or control gimmick.
5 Ants' Max Bevilacqua and Luis Oses - speaking to us in our latest Making Of feature - responded with something else entirely.
"The art style, the story, the tons of details, and the controls," they say.
In other words, Tiny Thief itself is the most impressive and enjoyable part of Tiny Thief.
And from the care and detail that 5 Ants put into the game, it's easy to see why the two developers feel this way.
Ants on the march
Given it's pre-Rovio low profile, you might think the Spanish developer has just appeared on the scene, but the team's been in business since 2004 working on Flash and Macromedia Director games that allowed players to explore what they call 'multi-user virtual worlds'.
With this background in mind, it might not be surprising to learn that Tiny Thief ran into a few problems during its development cycle for mobile platforms, notably in with its animations.
"One of the keys to create Tiny Thief was to be able to add as many animations as we felt the game needed, without restricting their size or length," the pair say.
"Unfortunately, AIR for iOS has some important limitations and, although Adobe has made efforts to improve the performance of games using bitmaps, the performance when using vector graphics is not as good as we needed in many devices."
With this in mind, 5 Ants turned to Scaleform to help bring their animations to life.
"Scaleform allowed us to overcome the limitations that Adobe AIR has on iOS and improved the performance of the game in most situations," they say.
When asked if it could have created Tiny Thief without Scaleform, 5 Ants ruefully noted that "it wouldn't have been the same game" since it would have required "more time looking for workarounds to problems and less time taking care of the many details that make Tiny Thief such a good game".
As most players know, a large part of what makes Tiny Thief so enjoyable is the friendship dynamic between the pint-sized purloiner and his ferret sidekick.
But where did the idea for a tiny thief and ferret friend come from - and for that matter, why a ferret?
The answer to the first part of the question is deceptively simple - "We thought right from the beginning that the main character had to be small so he could hide in particularly little hiding places".
As for the animal choice, 5 Ants thought "the Ferret was the perfect companion, cute and evasive, for the main character" who's a bit in "the Robin Hood spirit".
Along comes Rovio
With the characters and animation of Tiny Thief mostly sorted, 5 Ants began playing a build of the game with friends and colleagues - and this lead the studio to realise "that the potential audience was very broad, as the game was appealing to anyone that initially was interested by the story and the visuals."
But before Tiny Thief could come to market, an upstart Finnish company called Rovio approached 5 Ants about its new third-party publishing initiative, Rovio Stars.
Rovio aided in the development of Tiny Thief in many key areas, providing "valuable feedback regarding game design and expert vision on how to make it accessible to the broadest audience", but where Rovio really shined was with its "outstanding QA and really talented sound team."
Petit larceny
For all the post-build input that Rovio had, however, 5 Ants never considered releasing the game as anything other than a premium title because "the nature of Tiny Thief's gameplay makes it rather difficult to adapt the title to freemium models without making it a loss to the user".
After earning success and a Bronze Award on our sister site, Pocket Gamer, 5 Ants is looking at what's next for its studio and for Tiny Thief.
While ideally 5 Ants would "like to continue developing the games we like to do", it recognises that this means "incorporating the feedback and suggestions we get from the players to our future games and analysing market data" - so it won't be all fun and games for 5 Ants as it moves forward.
Well, it might not be all fun... but it'll certainly be all games.
Feature
US Correspondent
Representing the former colonies, Matt keeps the Pocket Gamer news feed updated when sleepy Europeans are sleeping. As a frustrated journalist, diehard gamer and recovering MMO addict, this is pretty much his dream job.
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