We got interviewed by the Belgian gaming website 9Lives. The interview is in Dutch and for those you can read it, the article can be found here. We kept the initial interview in English for you to read.

9lives: Fishing Cactus got formed in the aftermath of the 10tacle-collapse. Could you tell us a bit about how the first days of the company were? What were the biggest obstacles?

The idea of a studio was there way before the 10tacle-collapse. Julien and I wanted to develop Blobbies Wars (a XBLA project of ours) and having a company behind the project sounded like a good idea. Fishing Cactus and Blobbies Wars were at that time considered as a side project. The idea behind was to push the project in a professional framework to be able to go to Microsoft for example and talk about a publishing opportunity.

When 10tacle collapsed, we thought it might be a good opportunity to start a fully-fledged game development studio. But we didn’t know at that time that there were so many obstacles (hahaha). What’s great with this adventure is that some key people of 10tacle who liked the working environment wanted to join us from the start.

The more difficult aspects of the early days were not the setup of infrastructure, offices and so on but more to manage the business and marketing side of things and this is still something we are struggling with. We can create good and quality games but it is quite hard to get noticed as a game company, especially as a Belgian game developer.

Despite our one year lifespan we are still a young, small game development studio with a lot to learn.

9lives: Maarten De Meyer told us that there is a lot of talent in Belgium, especially with the newly created DAE-courses. Are you already watching out for talent in the Belgian market, like the finalists of the Imagine Cup?

Yes there is really a pool of talents here in Belgium and we try to build strong relationships with most schools in Belgium which deliver courses related to game development being design, art or programming.

We already have relations with Albert Jacquard in Namur, Technocité (Mons) and with Supinfogame in Valenciennes (France) where I personally did my studies. I met a few very talented students from the DAE-courses and we will definitely contact the school in a near future to see what we can do together.

So yes, we are definitely looking at the people here in Belgium before looking elsewhere. For the Imagine Cup, sure it is a fertile ground but schools and Imagine Cup seems to be very linked no? I’m also sure that all winners of the IC want to start their own studios aren’t they?

Anyway we have job or internship openings regularly and I invite artists and programmers to take a look at our job page, we may have a dream job for them!

9lives: Do you think that a Belgian Ubisoft (which was created with the assistance of the French government) could someday be started? What would be needed to get this going?

The problem for a big studio to come in Belgium (being a Ubisoft game studio or any big game development studio) is the lack of human resources (it is getting better though) and incentives from the Belgian government.

Here in Belgium game development studios aren’t as financially supported as in France, Canada or in the US for example. This means all Belgian studios have to compete on a worldwide scale and a good programmer in Belgium costs significantly more than in any other country. I recently attended a presentation from representatives of the Languedoc-Roussillon (a region in France where Ubisoft Montepellier is located) and incentives to go there are really interesting. It is something that is currently changing in Flanders but here in Wallonia, there is no dedicated incentives to work with and more traditional ones (for technology research for example) are quite hard and long to obtain.

In this framework and if nothing changes, I think only small to medium sized game development companies can exist in Belgium.

9lives: Enough about politics. Could you tell us a bit more about the projects that Fishing Cactus has done in the past and is doing now?

Yes sure!

We’ve been working for the past months on both iPhone and XBLA projects. While iPhone is a good platform it is also a very difficult platform to get noticed on. We’ve been quite successful doing a port of the well known Shift, a puzzle platform hit from Armor Games. We hit two weeks ago the 1,000,000 downloads milestone which is something we are quite proud of. However we’ve been less successful with another game Equilibrio (a port of a Wiiware game developed by DK-Games) which isn’t selling as much as expected.

Enough of past projects, let’s look at the future.

We currently have several projects in the pipe two being multi-platform games for the XBLA, Wiiware and PSN. We also have 1 Wiiware exclusive title (CODE NAME Eyeballs) and two iPhone projects in an advanced stage. We try to keep a balance between small and larger projects and between self-funded and work for hire projects in order to actually pay the bills but also to make the company move forward.

9lives: Your website states that you are working for several online platforms, such as the Wii, XBLA and PSN. Isn’t it hard to concentrate on several platforms, seeing how companies like Sucker Punch and Ubisoft tell us that exclusive material works best. How does that increase the workload and the financial risk you have to take?

When you are working with third party publishers and well known brands, publishers are more looking for companies which have the capacity to do nearly all available platforms. In this world class competition, which is the game development industry, being able to do games on those platforms for a cheaper price is a strong asset of our company.

That’s why we have developed a multi-platform engine (called Mojito by the way) to be really flexible about this and for example a game we have developed for the XBLA can be ported very easily on the PSN.

On the other side, this doesn’t mean we can’t do exclusive titles. Without going into much details, on digital platforms you can provide a temporary exclusivity to one of the manufacturers to get higher royalties and promotion. Taking the example of Ubisoft and Sucker Punch, the stakes of big AAA games are not necessarily the same as in the digital platform world but indeed some platforms are more popular than others and planning a good strategy for the master platform is crucial.

As an example, just look at The Behemoth, they did Castle Crashers (a great game and commercial success by the way) as an exclusive title for the XBLA and 6 months afterwards they are releasing it on the PSN. This is a typical case of a temporary exclusivity.

So in the end, supporting several platforms reduces part of the financial risks of a project. It increases the workload on teams but we are not doing all platforms at the same time (it is possible of course but then two teams must be put in parallel). Taking advantage of the tools and technology we’ve developed in the last 8 months, we are able to reduce this workload to its strict minimum.

9lives: Not only are you currently working on several projects, you apparently also support other publishers and developers. Does that mean that anyone who has good ideas and development skills can knock on your door to get assistance?

Yes! We are providing consultancy services to other game developers and publishers, mainly in design and code (AI, code performances, multi-threading, 3D camera) related areas.

While it is not our main activity we thought it might a good way to create strong relationships on a local level. We noticed that people are more open to collaborate when they know who is behind. On some very technical aspects of game development, we are very experienced (this sounds a little bit pretentious I know) and we provide a level of expertise game development teams don’t often have internally. So far the people with whom we worked were really satisfied with the services we provided.

Regarding your question, we are more than open to anyone with an idea and development skills with a rock solid game project. Our long-term goal is to be able to support small indie teams with an idea or a prototype and bring their project live. We want to support local developers and provide them with tools, platforms, knowledge, marketing and funding. A kind of small scale publisher.

We would like to be able to help those teams where Fishing Cactus had problems, especially in the early days and I’m taking the opportunity of this interview to make a call to projects. If you’re students with a great project / prototype, email us

We have tons of other ideas to promote and support small developers on a local scale but I definitely think it is worth another interview when we will be ready to explain this in details.

9lives: You currently have three available projects on your site (Blobbies Wars, Equilibrio, Shift) and two others in the works apparently (eyeballs, péchés mignons). Could you provide us with a short summary of each and how they have done?

Blobbies Wars is still in production, it is our main project. It is a ambitious XBLA game, very creative from the game design and artistic point of view. At this stage, we are actively looking for a publisher to help us get the best of this project.

Equilibrio is our first iPhone game (a port of a Wiiware title created by DK-Games where I did the levels), it is a tilt based 3D rolling ball platformer where the goal is to reach the exit. You have different types of balls to play with, the paper ball for example is very light and nearly fly, on the other side you have the rubber ball which bounces everywhere and is quite hard to control. Talking about numbers, the game performed well and more than expected on the Wiiware platform but poorly on the iPhone. The main issue on the iPhone market was the genre of the game, the graphics (not suited for the audience) and the way the experience was proposed to the player (very console oriented). While this project is not a complete disaster, it proved us that big games without a big publisher are nothing on the App Store. We learn from our mistakes.

Péchés Mignons is a small iPhone game we are currently developing for Casterman (Fluide Glamour). The game is based on a popular graphical novel of the same name made by a brilliant artist called Arthur de Pins. The game will be released in the coming months on the App Store as a free game to promote the graphic novel.

Last but not least we have Shift which is a 2D platform game we made on iPhone for Armor Games. If you don’t know this game yet I invite you to take a look at Shift 4 directly on Armor Games’ website. It’s just brilliant!

Just like I said previously, Shift is probably our best seller at the moment with now more than 1,000,000 units downloaded on the App Store. To be able to reach that point, we created a complete new way to think about platform game on the iPhone as well as adding a lot of new content (more than 35 new levels). By the way, and this is an exclusivity for 9lives, we just pushed an update for Shift, a free update which includes 15 new levels and a lot of small things here and there to improve the experience. It should be available in the coming weeks, after Apple’s approval.

9lives: It also seems that three more projects are due to be announced. Could you reveal a tad of the mystery surrounding them?

Hmmm, I cannot go into much details here but at least I can give you small hints:

We have two multi-platform retro-arcade games in the pipe that we are revamping. These have been really successful games in the past and we hope we will be able to bring them to their past glory. We should be able to release new info about one of them in the coming months.

We also have a project based on a pirate setting which features an extra ordinary adventure in a very Monkey Island like experience. However it is not a point and click adventure game. For me it has always been a dream to work on a pirate game (especially a cartoon one which incorporates a lot of humour) so now that I’ve my own game studio I decided to create a pirate game and the team followed me on this path. Did I say that Fishing Cactus’ team is really exceptional?

On top of those games which are at different stage of production, we have a few other great concepts already in the box awaiting for a production slot.

I hope it feeds a little bit your curiosity unfortunately I cannot reveal much more at this stage.

9lives: what are the future steps you are going to take and where do you hope Fishing Cactus will be in, let’s say, five years time?

Hmm difficult question because we are still a small, young company with a wide range of opportunities at the moment. What will happen in the next one year is already very blurry for us so what will happen in 5 years? I really don’t know!

To be honest, our goal is not to grow too big, we want to keep our team small because we think it is the only way to sustain economical crisis and still make good quality games, games made with our hearts.

So in five years time I’d like to see for Fishing Cactus with still very interesting and promising projects, the same burning passion for making games that we love and a growing community of players waiting for our next game.

9lives: One final question: Why the name Fishing Cactus?

HAHAHAHA. Nice try! We’d like to keep the mystery around the studio’s name for the moment but I invite all 9lives readers to guess what it means in the comments.

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