Archive for the ‘Company Life’ Category

Shift 2 iPhone featured and new Shift2QRcode

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

Shift 2 iPhoneA nice achievement for Fishing Cactus and ArmorGames as almost all AppStores (US, BE and FR at least) featured Shift 2 iPhone.

With an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars and ranked #27 out of 100 on the paid AppStore, we can say that we are on the road for another Apple success. Not to say we moved our asses and brought some great values to the sequel (120 levels, 30 bonus levels, 35 achievements, leaderboards, challenge friends online) and I must say the level designers at Fishing Cactus did a great job when designing all those new levels! We are all very excited and proud that you, players out there, liked what we created.

AppStore What's Hot Feature

And for those who are waiting for it, here is a new Shift2QRCode (use your camera to unlock a new level in the game):

And for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, this QR code unlocks a unique level in Shift 2 iPhone and if you get them all it will unveil something special. The question is: are you smart enough to discover the secret?!

For those who are still undecided here are some great reviews of the game:
- AppSpy (4/5)
- 148Apps.com (4.5/5)
- AppSafari (4/5)

You can download Shift 2 on the AppStore by following this link.

Stay tuned for more Shift news, we have some heavy work under progress we hope we’ll be able to share soon.

Fighters Uncaged played by 60 years old man

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Fighters Uncaged for Xbox Kinect is coming soon. Time for some fun with this new video appeared on the Internet (and no this is not a marketing strategy from Ubisoft). Enjoy!

Fishing Cactus represents at VAD EXPO 2010

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

As some of you may know, we were invited as guest speakers at the VAD Expo 2010 in Lille to talk about Advergaming on mobile devices, Motion gaming and ARG’s (Alternate Reality Games)

It was the chance to talk to industry leaders about the efficiency of games in Marketing and communication.

Of course, with video games, things always find a way to become funny and, honnestly, it’s for the best!

See what our friends from Adictiz found the time to do at the Expo:

Fishing Cactus presents R.O.G.E.R, the first Medical Kinect Serious game

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Together with the support of the Microsoft Innovation Center and a cluster of 4 therapists, we have created a prototype Serious game dedicated to patients who suffer from a lack of logic and organizational skills
(typically post-stroke patients, Alzheimer, hemi-negligent patients,…)

We have been getting a lot of press and attention about this project since we are pretty much the only studio in Belgium and maybe Europe who master the technology to build this game, the reason is that we have used Kinect Technology, a controller less movement recognition camera.

This allows our game to be piloted by any generation, and especially non digital natives who have never used a game controller or keyboard and mouse (very good indeed since most patients with those symptoms fall under this category).

The scenario for this prototype is simple, we have created a photo-realist environment running directly on the X360 composed of a bedroom, bathroom and a dressing. Each room has a certain amount of inventory spaces in which representations of objects are placed.

The therapists can task the patient to do his luggage for a specific destination (the mountains, the sea, a city-trip,…) and can observe how the patient reacts to the environment and the type of objects he gathers in his luggage. It helps the therapists to analyse and observe if patients are disorganized and see where they have lost their common sense and focus on those points in therapy. Of course we create several pertubating elements to make them lose focus (phone ringing, radio and so on).

The game is evolving and the 2 year goal from here is to have a very innovative and collaborative project.

Fighters Uncaged Kinect trailer

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Fighters Uncaged KinectSome of you already figured out (check last posts if not) but Fishing Cactus has been quite involved in the development of Fighters Uncaged, a Ubisoft title developed by AMA Studios (Fishing Cactus closely collaborated with the AMA team).

Fighters Uncaged is planned as a launch title for Kinect next November so be prepared for an overwhelming number of posts on the blog as the release date is getting closer.

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Fighters Uncaged previewed on Destructoid

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Fighters Uncaged on DestructoidDestructoid did a first preview of Fighters Uncaged, a Kinect launch title on which Fishing Cactus collaborated with AMA studios (game published by Ubisoft). You can find the complete preview here:http://www.destructoid.com/impressions-fighters-uncaged-185701.phtml

In a nutshell, here’s what Ben Perlee says about the game: “I can say that Fighters Uncaged could be a novel alternative to the swarms of sports titles coming to Kinect. It’s not outrageously violent, but it is certainly different from the swarms of candy colored games ready to hit the market. Between the recognized long kicks and short punches, it’s clear that the game is putting the device through its paces in recognizing different moves, and that in itself is a step up from other motion controlled fighting games.”

Fighters Uncaged Kinect

4 new team members join FC

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

There has been a lot going on with the internal team recently. In the last 2 months we’ve welcomed Benjamin, Samuel, Jef and Fabrice at Fishing Cactus. Please let me introduce them to you.

Benjamin has been in the game industry for almost 12 years and is a versatile, polyvalent, 3D/2D artist who will bring a lot to the team expertise and its various projects. Favorite sentence? Tic-Tac…

Fabrice is a talented, multi-task, coffee-drinker (this is mandatory), programmer with already a long career and proven track record. His first experience in the game industry lasted 5 years when he was working at Larian. After that he went to Hydravision for a little while. He worked on a wide range of projects and consoles and is already tackling some serious iPhone stuff involving physics. Wow!

Samuel has joined Fishing Cactus initially as a game and level design intern from Supinfogame. For instance he’s the one behind some of the craziest levels you’ve seen in Minim and in the upcoming Shift projects. He loves so much Fishing Cactus that he decided to stay with us a little bit longer and to join our creative team permanently (he’s sleeping in the cellar!).

Jef has been recently graduated from the Howest Kortrijk Univerty College and he is the lastest one to join us as programmer (actually yesterday). After a first experience at Larian, he decided to join Fishing Cactus for the awesome projects we have in the pipe. And yeagh, he brought some biscuits for his first day of work. Well done Jef, you know how to make friends!

OK guys enough for the flowers, let’s get to work now!

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”.

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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.