Archive for the ‘Company life’ Category

Shift 2 level contest

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Shift iPhoneAs some already guessed, Armor Games and Fishing Cactus are bringing Shift 2 to the iPhone, and we need your help. We are looking for users to create and submit levels for ‘Shift 2′ that we can feature in the game.

If we end up featuring your level in Shift 2 (iPhone) you’ll get your full name in the credits as well as a free copy of the game in the app store.

The rules for the contest are as follows:

1. E-mail your level codes to support@fishingcactus.com
2. Make sure you include your full name to be listed in the credits
3. Lastly, submit an e-mail address that is easiest to reach you so the game can be sent to the winners.

Armor Games & Fishing Cactus wishes all contestants the best of luck! To get started, click here. Follow us on Twitter to know in real-time what we think about the levels submitted!

Virtual Characters AI at Paris AiGameDev Conference

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Last week, part of our team had the chance to attend the AI game dev conference in Paris. This world renowned conference is mostly the result of AiGameDev.com Alex and Petra Champandard’s hard work. Big thanks to them then! Everyone on the team that attended the conference will discuss the conference talks in the coming week or so, but let me tell that these covered a very large breadth of topics ranging from high level inspirational design panels to down to the nuts and bolts of making AI characters behave smarter and more interestingly.

Hey, that's us!

On my part, I’ll spend this post writing about the conference keynote that I found to be both interesting and inspirational; this talk by Bruce Blumberg was titled “Intimate Conversations with Interactive Animated Characters”.

(more…)

Shift & Starshine available on Bada store

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

OK that’s true we have tons of projects coming out! RollOut, Dimension, Gridz. Today we’re announcing the release of 2 of our latest games on the Samsung Bada Store, Starshine and Shift! Most of you already know everything about Shift and basically it is a port from iPhone to Samsung Bada. However I’m sure some of you don’t know anything about Starshine, yet!

Starshine game has been initially developed as a flash game by Hero Interactive. Your goal is simple: light all the stars of a given puzzle. You have just one shot to trigger a marvelous stellar fireworks!

Starshine Screenshot 1

Starshine features 50 levels to keep you busy with its shining gameplay! Beautiful, poetic visual style, simple and elegant control scheme. Finally a relaxing but yet challenging type of puzzle gameplay for everyone.

Starshine Screenshot 02

Just like Gridz, Starshine is also coming on the iPhone later this year.

Sooooo Much Traffic

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

We have finally received our American Traffic Light !

This beauty will be used on our Build server so that when one of our guys screws up and breaks the code, the traffic light will turn bright RED. Once they have fixed their mistake, after a good beat up, the light will come back to BLUE.

Want to see it? Come say hi to us then!

RollOut, an innovative iPhone platform game

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

RollOut coming to your iPhoneOK we haven’t spoken of in-house projects for quite a long time but we have been working on almost 6 projects at the same time. Today we are going to present you one of them: RollOut which is a unique platform game planned to be released first on the iPhone and will come on iPad later on (depend on you guys).

In RollOut you play as Wabba, a cute little creature and you have to help it get through levels in a uniquely nervous platform game that we exclusively designed with Artik Entertainment team for the iPhone platform in mind.

RollOut has a simple but yet challenging goal: touch the screen to scroll the icons and order Wabba when to speed up or speed down, when to jump and when to stop… Wabba truly depends on your scrolling skills to reach the end of each level!

Here is a teaser artwork for you to feed on while you wait for the official press release.

RollOut iPhone Concept Art

Fishing Cactus Space Adventure

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Cleaning Up @ Fishing Cactus

Friday, May 7th, 2010

New Offices Part 1

Friday, March 19th, 2010

We just moved into new offices and here is a small composition showing you everything you need to know about it.

Enjoy!

The first baby cactus is born!!!

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

March 1st 2010, 1:03 am CET, my wife gave birth to our first baby. His name is Liam, he weighted 3,6 Kg and was 51,5cm tall. Everything went well, the baby and his mother are in great condition. He is officially the first baby of the Fishing Cactus Era ( and the first of all 5 founders’ ;-) ), but he won’t stay alone for too long. The photo shows the monster dressed with clothes offered by Fishing Cactus’ friends.

Liam Hamaide

I’m now back to work, just in time to move into our new office. But more about that later on ;-) .

The Quest for the perfect design tool!

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

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…).
(more…)