As promised the live session is coming with tiny modifications. The idea stills the same: you will be able to see the game in live and question the team on the chat. Following the feedback we got from the community, we decided to drop Google Hangout and go with Twitch instead. It came to our attention that Twitch would be more suitable due its history with the community and furthermore, the tests we carried out seem to point at a better overall streaming quality that Google Hangout.
So, tune it on the 27th of June at 8PM (GMT+1) and join us on our Twitch.tv channel. The live stream will be accessible to everyone but if you want to access the chat room make sure you have an account on Twitch.tv.
As for the chat room, moderators from Fishing Cactus and ProSiebenSat.1 Games will both be on the chat to make sure that we have got all the answers to your questions. To easily recognize us and keep the place clean, the team will be in red color, so please do not use the same color. Sometimes the chat room is a little bit fickle and the page needs to be refreshed twice to be able to see it.
Over the last few weeks, Fishing Cactus has received a few visits of the nice people from ProSiebenSat.1 Games. The reason behind all that brouhaha was Creatures 4.
ProSiebenSat.1 happens to be a proper media and entertainment mogul over here in Europe. “ProSiebenSat.1 Games GmbH is the games company of ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG. As a leading publisher, the company focuses on the licensing and distribution of online and mobile games, and acts as a strong digital distribution partner for the gaming products of premium partners all over Europe.” is what the press release lingo precisely says. Not only do they distribute in Europe several hit online games, including the great blockbuster games DC Universe™ Online, PlanetSide® 2, and the sequel of the EverQuest® franchise. They also run successful television stations (their original activity) in Germany and Nordic Countries, and have ties with massive French and Italian channels too (TF1 and RAI).
This is just the ideal partner for us, as small indie developer, and Bigben Interactive, as publisher. By partnering with this ideal fit, our respective companies will be able to each focus on what they do best: us making the game, Bigben Interactive making the toys and physical goodies and handling the logistics, while ProSiebenSat.1 Games makes sure that there are many people playing the game across Europe and that we can scale up the network properly.
Cause it’s now official, the ink on the contract barely dry: we have entered an agreement with ProSiebenSat.1 Games for the distribution, maintenance and marketing of our game on the Old Continent.
There are a few consequences to this.
The first one is merely cosmetic: the official launch title will be changed from the tentative Creatures 4 to the definitive “Creatures Online” in an effort to attract new players who had never heard of the previous episodes some good 15 years ago.
A more important shift is the fact that ProSiebenSat.1 Games is now in charge of deploying the right server network for us, which they have booked already and plan to be ready with around July or so. Once that’s in place, they will be running a first round of beta, which at first will be CLOSED. Access to the beta will be as easy as creating an user account on their network, signing Non-Disclosure Agreements and then stick to confidentiality for realsies
If you live in another area of the World not covered by ProSiebenSat.1 Games, don’t worry about a thing — We have no intention of leaving you standing in the rain alone. We are currently on the look for Northern American and Asian distributors of similar magnitude and we are in talks with several companies for that. Announcements will follow in due course.
Last but not least, a lot of you have asked us to show video footage of the alpha version we’ve recently feature locked. We’d like to do that. But rather than taking a lot of time editing a trailer that doesn’t talk to you, we’d like to combine the depth of our game with the pleasure that was the Q&A session we recently had in the CreaturesCaves chat rooms, a few months back… So! How about a Google+ HangOut event with the team sitting in a sofa in front of the running demo, everybody? Would you attend to that? Say some time this June? Let’ s hook it up!
Maybe you know about us because of hit mobile games such as :shift:, IndestructoTank, Paf Le Chien, After Burner Climax or Slash Monsters. Maybe you came to this blog because you’re a long-time Creatures fan and you’re dying for updates about upcoming Creatures 4 on PC, MAC, iOS and Android. What you might not know is that behind the scenes, for the last three years already, more and more companies have turned to Fishing Cactus for research and development on lots of Serious Gaming projects that have an impact either on resource management and staff training or on very important society sectors, such as health for example.
Fishing Cactus talking Serious Games and Creatures 4 on Belgian national TV channel, RTL-TVi. Click on the Closed Captions icon at the bottom edge of the frame to activate English subtitles.
Hpoe you’re fnie. Is tehre soemthnig worng wtih my psot? Srue not! Atcaully you hvae jsut knid of plyaed our new gmae Swappin’ avialbale tdoay.
Our new spelling race style word-game is available on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android for only 0.99$ / 0.79€ and is playable in English, French, Italian, German and Portuguese.
In a nutshell, Swappin’ is a simple and addictive game in which you have to find the swapped letters to progress forward. If you didn’t get the point yet, I guess it’s time to start playing it and train you lzay barin!
Swappin’ is not the sole creation of Fishing Cactus as Stefan Nicholic, creator of the concept, has put a lot of efforts into the flash version of the game (released a couple of months ago). For this specific iOS/Android version, Fishing Cactus added quite a lot of new concepts including the double swapping mechanic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!
A packed update this time around as we’ve let a bunch of norns go wild and loose and we all know what can happen when you do that
Our animator has spent a few days on a funny angle to present you our latest progress on the Norn Creatures. See, after getting viewed over a cool billion times down on Earth, Psy’s intergalactic hit Gangnam Style has now reached Sphericus, the planet where the cute intelligent Norns race now (tries to) live. Enjoy
You probably have already noticed it on the official web site, some lucky few have even been gifted one while visiting Paris Games Week, a limited sample batch of small Norn figurines has recently been produced… And one of them has escaped from the box and is now hiding in our offices, stealing sneak peek photographs of our gang at work, paparazzi style! Follow our little Norn reporter’s Instagram feed right here.
Our Sophie Schiaratura has also opened up a little something for you girls*: a Pinterest account full of cuteness all around. We will soon run some special activities there… If you’re into nail-art and that sort of things, go subscribe immediately and pin away, ladies*!
(* If you’re a male, you’re welcome to take a look around too – We won’t judge you.)
On a final note, some of you heard rumors about it so we might as well go on the record: we won’t be ready to launch before the end of the year. The team is knee-deep in crunch time, learning to adjust their bodies and brains to less sleep at nights and more caffeine during the day, but there are still a few bullet lists to cross out. We currently hope to enter bêta phase in January. “Hope” means: it might as well be February that we wouldn’t be totally shocked. That’d translate into a live date around March/April 2013 or so. “Ship when it’s ready” is our stance on this one. Expectations are high and we know it — We can’t afford to drop the ball by rushing it out. We’ve spent too much care on this so far. We will very soon deliver you with a more thorough, radically transparent update about what’s been happening on the development side of things this far. Keep an eye on this space.
UPDATE – Nov 9th:A new update for Slash Monsters has appeared on the Apple AppStore this morning and it fixes absolutely all the bugs that had been previously reported. No more memory crashes when restoring, no more unwanted pop-ups when playing offline, no more trouble — Just plain fun. If you have Slash Monsters installed on your stylish smartphone or tablet, you can head on to the AppStore right now, where the new update will be pushed to your device in a flash. Apologies for the inconveniences! If you haven’t downloaded Slash Monsters yet, now is the right time to do just that
Everyone already knows that the ocean is in danger, but now the sweet starfishes are extinguishing even faster, and not because of pollution! Some nasty pink octopi are after them and they’re not coming alone! Jellyfishes, sandworms and even sea urchins want to kill these helpless creatures! At the power of your fingertip, you’ll perform awesome combos to slash your way through them all. For an invidivual presentation of each enemy type, along with exclusive tips on how to defeat each and every one of them, head on to our Facebook. Oh, and if you find the artwork as gorgeous as we do, keep in mind that there are 6 different worlds to explore, through 36 adrenaline-pumping levels
Naturally, you’ll also get to compete with your social and virtual friends through leaderboards, achievements and whatnot. And while talking online, you can visit the game official web site through the www.SlashMonsters.com url. You’d think we paid top dollar and carefully planned the acquisition of such a cool-ass domain name — But funnily enough, would you believe that we found out it was available totally in accident just last night, and snatched it for a few bucks right on time for today’s launch. Now, ain’t that good karma?
Published by our friends from White Laser Games, Slash Monsters has been under development internally since the beginning of the year, with no less than eight of us working on the game. Guillaume Bouckaert designed the game with our mighty Bruno Urbain, who also served as producer. Programming has been performed by our resident wizards, but on this one they’ve used a tremendous amount of help from Maarten De Meyer, who has been moonlighting with us for the last six months. Cédric Van Putte handled quality control testings, while the Windows 8 side of the project was managed by Laurent Grumiaux. Besides our own, we can’t thank the guys over at Tokkun Studio enough for their wonderful visual art! (and Amandine Flahaut for reworking them here and there). Here’s hoping you lot enjoy playing the game as much as we enjoyed brewing it :3
(For those of you who don’t understand French, please relax: we are working on an English subtitled edition that we will upload to our Facebook as soon as it is ready.)
On 25th of September, in a really selective setting , at Le Manége Theater in Mons, took place the award ceremony for one of the most important events in the area: the XIIIth edition of the Wallonia Export Grand Prix organized by the AWEX (the local governmental branch dedicated to export). The theme of the evening was ‘the flight towards success’, so the show was filled with circus acrobats in every corner.
Fishing Cactus was granted the “Export Springboard Award” (“Tremplin à l’exportation” in French), to reward our huge growth in overseas sales over the last 3 years.
Honored and privileged we thought of sharing a couple of pictures with you folks from the award ceremony and TV videos from the media coverage. For more of those head onto our Facebook page! We ave been literally invaded by television crews this days and it was really fun seeing each others on TV!
So here’s your chance to know us a bit better, grab your popcorns, ‘cos it’s gonna start! Quick!
Ever dreamt of being a big shot producer or a powerful entertainment mogul? This is your chance to get started.
We have listed our next hit project on Gambitious, and everybody is welcome to invest in it and actually own a piece of the revenue share! Think of it as an evolved Kickstarter: by investing, you get more than a few perks and collectible gifts; you essentially become a stakeholder in the venture. Gambitious is basically like an online stock exchange for game properties.
The game project we have selected for this, titled Piratoons, is in very early stages of development and has been identified as having strong franchise potential.
Now sit back and relax, Mr. Big, here’s our mind-blowing pitch for you:
«Steer your ship along the tropical coastlines, upgrade it with new powerful and magical artifacts, recruit the most greedy pirate crew and engage in exciting real-time Match-3 battles to prove your skills and gather hefty amounts of doubloons! Set sail for the search of the legendary Pelican Tooth, meet a great cast of wacky cartoon pirates, trade extraordinary goods, capture, protect and build harbors. Piratoons lets you experience the warmth of the Caribbean Sea, its lush colors, seducing rhythms and extraordinary stories.»
Mind blown away? Feels like this is something you want to help making happen? Smells like a profitable opportunity? Then hop on board and let’s go quest for those hidden treasures together! Oh, and if you’re broke and want to help us get our games made anyway, you can still vote for Eyeball Invaders over at Steam Greenlight completely free of charge
It started as a collective effort … Pretty soon Nature prevailed.
Eyeballs Invaders have landed on a mysterious planet and they need to get as many energy orbs as they can to build themselves a new spaceship. Only one tiny problem: there’s not enough room on the replacement shuttle for all of them. Let the massacre begins, cause in the end, only one will survive and go home!
The Eyeball Invaders is a free to play fast-paced multi-player action game for PC, Mac and Linux in which each player takes control of one of many different eyeball-like character and jumps his way through 5 wonderful planets and 150 tricky levels.
Discover The Eyeball Invaders world through an exciting single player adventure mode or tackle the challenges with your friends! The game will let you challenge up to seven other players over five hectic modes of play, for some local eight-player brawling madness! And if you prefer playing online, go through the steam community and game integrated lobbies to find yourself more challengers!
Control your jump power and leap left or right to catch the Orbs in the glimpse of an eye. Stick to the walls and use them as launching platforms to jump even further! Watchwords: jump, stick and brawl! Feels like something you’d like to play? Then do something about it and head over to Steam Community, where we’re waiting for your votes to get Greenlit!
As you probably already know Shift is one of our biggest successes, with almost 16 millions players worldwide, and we are developing and porting it from one platform to another as fast as we can offering you each time a new game experience and new content to have fun with. This time around, it’s the Nintendo 3DS we are shifting.
We started developing this new edition in December 2011 in partnership with the owner of the license Armor Games and two different publishers, Rising Star Games for Europe and Aksys in the US. The game has been released in Europelast friday! And if you want to try it before buying it, a free demo version is on the Nintendo eShop on your 3DS!
Don’t lose this opportunity because Shifting World will totally plunge you inside the world of Shift and this time in full-on 3D!! And that’s not a gimmick either, it truly affects gameplay here. You will have to constantly switch between 3D and 2D views to find your way through 60 levels and 5 worlds. In the demo version you will have access to one level and you won’t be able to play the Time Attack Mode, the option that allows you to play the game against the clock, but you’ll basically get just about enough to fall in love with the game!
Flip your 3DS open and download the Shifting World demo right now!
Fishing Cactus creates games for mobiles (F2P, Freemium mostly now) and digital consoles as well as Advergames and Serious Games (Kinect most notably).
- Working on Creatures 4
- Working on AAA iPhone project
- Finalizing 2 iPhone F2P projects
- Reach Beta for our Browser game
- Improving our pipeline and processes
As promised the live session is coming with tiny modifications. The idea stills the same: you will be able to see the game in live and question the team on the chat. Following the feedback we got from the community, we decided to drop Google Hangout and go with Twitch instead. It came to our attention that Twitch would be more suitable due its history with the community and furthermore, the tests we carried out seem to point at a better overall streaming quality that Google Hangout.
Maybe you know about us because of hit mobile games such as :shift:, IndestructoTank, Paf Le Chien, After Burner Climax or Slash Monsters. Maybe you came to this blog because you’re a long-time Creatures fan and you’re dying for updates about upcoming Creatures 4 on PC, MAC, iOS and Android. What you might not know is that behind the scenes, for the last three years already, more and more companies have turned to Fishing Cactus for research and development on lots of Serious Gaming projects that have an impact either on resource management and staff training or on very important society sectors, such as health for example.
