Shift iPhone, developed by Fishing Cactus and published by Armor Games has been picked as one of the three finalists for the Mochis Awards as the best iPhone port (from a flash game). We are currently competing against Canabalt from Adam Atomic.

We’d like to ask everyone who reads our blog to vote for us here.

UPDATE: Results are in and we “only” managed to get the 2nd spot on the list! Congratulations to  Adam Atomic! (we’ll get you next time, you wait and see )

In the best company of the world and with the most talented team (Belgians are famous for their self-derision), it is mandatory to use the most advanced technologies for creating our games. Of course just for your pleasure.

This is why we decided to automate our “Game Content Pipeline” with a continuous integration process. To do this, we used “Hudson” simply because it wasn’t too difficult to implement within the Mojito Engine and secondly because the solution is quite complete.

One of the first step I had to undertake within this pipeline was to import all assets from a graphical software and export them to a format our engine will be able to use. Collada is perfect for this job and this is why we went on to create a Collada importer and a viewer which runs in the Mojito Engine.

For the first time we are proud to present you, the star of all stars, “Mr. Duck” from Mojito’s viewer.

As designers we are always looking for the best tool to communicate our ideas. At Fishing Cactus we always try to come up with collaborative solutions and we try to keep the following motto: “not make a 100 pages design document”. Instead we try to find solutions to keep the design document light and readable for different audiences. Managers want to have an overview of the game in order to evaluate scope. Programmers want to have a clear understanding of the mechanic they have to implement and game designers want to know how a mechanic works with another. Most of the time all these people are looking for either a very detailed aspect of the game or a big overview.

All design documents are living pieces, changes in scope and gameplay mechanics occur more than once in the lifespan of a game project. Also there are different types of design documents: game concept, game treatment, one pager, game design document, game backlog (if you are using SCRUM). Also, a variety of production documents is generated as the design undergoes implementation (asset lists for one, localization texts list and so on…).
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As you may have read on this blog a week ago we began porting the Mojito Engine on the GNU/Linux platform.

It’s going pretty well, faster than I originally expected. I started by translating the display part, initially running with DirectX on the Windows version and now running with OpenGL. The result was as expected, and that’s how we were able to post the first screenshot you’ve seen in an earlier post. We rapidly figured out that the input system provided by GLUT was not exactly what we needed. So we decided to rewrite that specific engine part with SDL in order to have not only the keyboard but the joypad too!

And I’m proud to say that everything is now fully working My next task will be to port the sound system of the engine.

As you can see in World of Goo, created by 2D Boy, they had about 17% of their sales on the Linux platform. It looks like a lot of open source gamers are just waiting for some stuff to play on the penguin!

So, be ready, Linux-users! Because in a not so distant future, you will be able to run on your hardware some Fishing Cactus games and show off in front of all your friends!

Why so few news lately (except today and for the Linux post obviously)? Because Fishing Cactus is heavily occupied not on one, not on two but on four new projects!

The projects are under development on a yet secret mobile device for a well known manufacturer.

On top of this, we are also working on a game project including some highly anticipated piece of technology.

We hope we’ll be able to share more with you in the coming days.

With the mondial crysis, it’s important to think about the people who are in need. They maybe can’t buy a fully functional Mac or an expensive Windows licence…

Luckily, they can discover the joy of working with the open-source “OS for the poor”, Linux!

We have already improved the most current platforms on the market with our kickass Mojito Engine, and we are now currently working on the Linux version.

And just because we like you guys, readers of this blog, we will offer you the exclusivity of the year : the first screenshot of a not-so-mysterious project, running on Ubuntu!

I know how much it’s beautiful, but don’t cry yet, keep your tears when it will be fully functional so stay tuned!

Hi everyone, we are proud to announce that 5 people are going to join us early this year. Thibaut and Christophe#1 are new programmers and Andrea is joining us as game designer.

Add to this Christophe#2 and Julien#2, two new interns! A new company picture will be released soon and in the meantime we wish them a warm welcome. When do you guys organize a BBQ?

Hmmm, it is also time to think about a new location because we are running short in space here.

We’ve been recently interviewed by the popular Belgian magazine Telemoustique. While we are waiting a little bit for a complete scan of the paper version you can already find a big part of the interview directly on the magazine’s website and more specifically here. The interview is in French.

I’m also taking some time now to wish you a happy new year!

Best wishes from everyone here at Fishing Cactus!

2010 definitely looks like an interesting year for everything’s Cactus as we’re gearing up for a whole lot of new projects and opportunities!

Stick with us for a slew of cool games and enjoy your traditional holidays banquets!

In the first post, I introduced the thread local storage we use across all platforms. The main goal was to provide similar interface and features as __declspec( thread ) variables provided by some compilers. The previous post reproduced in pure C++ what gcc and cl.exe allowed as extension, but on every platform that supports at least 1 thread local storage. The goal of this post is to extend the existing system to all types including complex classes.

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