We have a new designer in the team, and hell yeah she’s talented! She’s overlooking the creation process of the levels of Equilibrio and bark to motivate her fellow colleagues like any good project manager no? And uh, I’m talking about the dog by the way.
Yeah this is also how we work at Fishing Cactus.
And yeah, I nearly forgot about that, Happy New Year to everybody!
Fishing Cactus is proud to announce the development of Equilibrio, a mind flowing, puzzle solving and gyrating game for Nintendo WiiWare and iPhone / iTouch platforms.
Co-jointly developed by Fishing Cactus and DK-Games, Equilibrio will hit both Nintendo WiiWare service and Apple Store in Q1 2009.
Equilibrio is our first mid-scaled project and we had the task to create the iPhone version of the game as well as designing the levels and some of the game mechanics for both versions.
Thanks to our multi-platform engine and, of course, talented programmers, we were able to get the first version of the game from the Wii version to the iPhone in less than 2 weeks, I think it’s not that bad. From that point started the work on the iPhone version to make it fun, playable and enjoyable modifying the initial design and levels enough to have an interesting game experience on the console.
The game features an easy and accessible gameplay, pick and play philosophy targeted for both hardcore and casual gamers (I assure you that the last levels of the conquest mode are still really hard). Thanks to its short levels the game asks low time investment from the player, you can play in the train or in the subway. One level often lasts from 2 to 10 minutes depending on your skill and mastery of the different balls. It is something that we wanted to push in the game as the iPhone is a handheld console. To increase replayability, the game features 4 play modes, cross profile high score tables and trophies which are unlocked under certain circumstances (like the one you can find on XBLA and PSN titles).
Also maybe you didn’t notice in the screenshot but all graphics of the game are in 3D, we have a dynamic minimap and intelligent camera zoom to help players see incoming obstacles.
You can find more information about the game on the official website (http://www.equilibrio-game.com). Enjoy!
Console has recently pushed a new paradigm in the hand of game programmers. Multi-thread programming is now in our everyday life. The transformation of a sequential game engine into a multi-threaded engine is far from being trivial, and no references exists on this particular topic. Even if multithread programming is far from being new, few books are focused on concept and theory. Books about API are good, but they don’t teach you the good way to use the APIs from a design point of view. This book introduces theory and then apply it with code samples. Everything is programmed in java, but it applies to C++ as well.
The first chapters introduce abstract theoretical concepts, such as memory models. The next chapters cover concrete datas structures that help understanding concepts exposed earlier. The approaches and concepts used will help the reader to understand the phase one must follow to transform a sequential algorithm into a multi-threaded one. Most of the book is oriented around collection, but the result is good: each collection touches a new problem and exposes a new solution. Going from lock-based to lock-free algorithm, the process shows step by step transformations of collections such as set, list, hash map. To finish, work distribution and transactional memory are explained. Those chapters also introduce concepts that may appear in future architectures. The book closes with a huge appendix that exposes platform specific knowledge that one must know to address unexplained behaviors.
Elegantly written, this book is a bible, the code provided is clear, and the difficulty increases smoothly chapter after chapter. This book must be putted into every game programmer’s hands. But if they do not have any multiprocessor knowledge, the dive may be hard to stand.
We recently received our access to Nintendo development tools. Dev kits have been ordered and are on their way. We are really excited to see our projects taking life on such amazing platforms. Until now our Wii targeted softwares have been developed on PC. We hope it won’t take long until our games run on the console as we’ve already quite an extensive experience on GameCube (it’s not that different from the specs point of view). The next step is to play with the Wii Remote and see if our concepts prove to be correct.
Stay tuned, news will soon flow about our first Nintendo project.
Fishing Cactus is an independent game development studio based in Belgium.
We create games for digital distribution platforms such as XBLA, PSN, Wiiware and iPhone.
Find out more on the official website.
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- Finishing a new iPhone game
- Pitching game concepts
- Working on Wiiware title
- Working on Mojito Engine
- Discovering Samsung’s bada