Archive for the ‘Company life’ Category

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…).
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4 projects on a secret device

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

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.

5 persons join the team

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

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.

Interview in Telemoustique

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

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!

Merry Cactus!

Monday, December 28th, 2009

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!

Winter sausages & Star Wars

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

To celebrate Christmas and the departure of our interns, we did our tradtionnal winter BBQ and setup our illuminated Yoda Christmas tree!

Winter at Fishing Cactus

We are not Blizzard but this looks real snow no?

Winter at Fishing Cactus

As usual our BBQ features big sausages :) I’d like to thank Armand, Andreas and Marco for this delicious BBQ.

Yoda Christmas Tree

For those who missed the new blog theme take a look top left of this screen.

Paint it Cactus!

Friday, December 11th, 2009

It’s not Christmas yet, but since we’re such a bunch of thoughtful fellows, here’s the mighty Fishing Cactus wallpaper! It’s available in every shape and size for your everyday desktop needs. Enjoy!

Download Fishing Cactus Wallpapers!

Our next projects?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

We have already two projects nearly ready to be released! The first one is Mikks, a fresh, stylized and hardcore color based puzzle game exclusive for the iPhone. You’ll find this one very addictive.

The second project, also another exclusive iPhone and iPod Touch game, is call RollOut, it is a very unique platformer which has been co-developed with Artik Enterainment.

I’ll not say too much about them now, you’ll have to wait until the official press release.

We’ll attend the Game Connection in Lyon next week (8,9,10 December). If you want to meet us there feel free, we are in booth 100.

Shaun White Origins on iPhone

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

We are finally able to talk a little bit about one of the projects we’ve been working on for the past months.

With the recent press release regarding Shaun White, Fishing Cactus is now able to proudly say that they have been heavily involved in the development process of Shaun White Origins on iPhone alongside AMA and Ubisoft.

The game is making its way to the App Store this December and is truly the best snowboarding game you’ll find on the iPhone, with some exciting new features such as an asynchronous multiplayer system through a ghost that you can send to your friends.

This unique 3D snowboarding project has been truly an amazing experience for Fishing Cactus and working with the Shaun White property a real pleasure for us all.

For those who want to know more about the game here’s the official press release from Ubisoft with some crispy details about the game. Enjoy!

Ubisoft is excited to present Shaun White Snowboarding Origins on the iPhone thanks to a collaboration with Advanced Mobile Applications (AMA Ltd) who will be in charge of developing and publishing the game on this new platform.

Shaun White Snowboarding Origins is expected to launch worldwide in December, closely following the launch of Ubisoft’s Wii console version. This title will encompass everything Shaun White and the iPhone reflect, including Shaun’s extensive community-based cult following.

The game will present a unique and iPhone specific snowboarding experience featuring:
• Four slopes spanning all corners of the globe – Chile, Japan, Spain and the USA
• Strong 3D graphics and quality audio
• Inventive controlling
• Ghost sending and playing option to share challenges, scores and tricks with your friends and the rest of the world, including a world ranking leaderboard
• The possibility to attempt and execute snowboarding tricks including ollies, tail grabs, melon and indy grabs, as well as spins and flips!