It’s a cliché to say 2012 is going to be a big year, but it really is. We have a dedicated Serious Gaming website under construction and a lot of projects are going to be released next year including some very anticipated ones.

I would like to thank everyone who visits the site, follows us and supports the company and its projects. We get a lot of feedback (especially on Creatures ) and we can assure you it’s all taken on board whether good or bad. If you’ve clicked a link, sent an email, made a comment, followed us on Twitter or Facebook or even said a kind word, you’re helping us to get better at this.

So in the name of Fishing Cactus’ team (and a little bit late), Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Following the FIFF in Namur, Belgium, Fishing Cactus has been nominated amongst 12 belgian movies to provide 3 gaming projects around the popular word: “crossmedia” as marketing support for two films: Torpedo (K2 & KAZAA, Matthieu Donck) and Approved for Adoption (Mosaïc Films, Artémis).

Torpedo pitch:

“Michel Ressac is a 35 year old men having hard time being successful in anything. His life is going to change forever when he learns that he won a dinner with his all life star, the famous cyclist Eddie Merckx.”

Approved for Adoption pitch:

“European on the heads side, Asian on the tails side. Cartoonist. 42 years old according to his civil status, Jung prefers to place his birth at the age of 5, when a policeman found him wandering alone on the streets of Seoul. He is one of those 200 000 adopted Koreans spread around the world.”

Stay tuned for more information about the advergames we’re creating for the movies.

For those who missed that piece of unique gameplay, Shift is a simple platforming game turned inside-out with the addition of a shift function that allows the player to flip between the black and white portions of the game map, forcing them to warp their perceptions to proceed. It’s pretty much perfect as it is.

Working for more than 2 years on the Shift series, we thought we can make this game even more perfect with a specific take on the Nintendo 3DS. Shifting World takes the shifting element from the original game (rotators, keys, doors, spikes) and adds an additional layer of complexity (and new mechanics) by allowing players to shift between 2D and 3D. As far as the changes made, the story has also been revisted and will introduce new twists in a brand new funky universe!

Game is planned to hit the stores early Q2 2012. Stay tuned for more and in the meantime enjoy the screenshots!

It’s time for a long overdue update.

Let’s start with the big bad news of the day. Creatures 4 is delayed until Q2 2012 (no date yet). I know, it sucks, but let me explain the reasons for this fairly huge delay and why it will be a good thing for the game.

And there’s some good news too…

Let me present the Hatchery. The first environment you’ll play in when launching the game for the first time and your central tool to bring the Norn eggs into the world. Hope you like it!

The Hatchery is pretty important in showing the kind of starting scenario your Creatures 4 experience will start with.

The real piece of good news is for the Android fans among you. We’re happy to announce that Creatures 4 will be released on your devices too! A lot of people requested it when we were at Gamescom and since the Android market is definitely growing, it ultimately made sense to Bigben and ourselves to get this going on.

So, let’s tackle the reasons for the delay and discuss where we are in regards to development right now.

There are two main reasons for the delay.

First, it simply took more time than we anticipated to reach our target quality and merge the Creatures engine into our own to bring the game to 3D. We’re very happy on how it’s going at the moment and we’ve finally reached a point where a freeform sandbox experience can run on its own without imploding into a black hole and suck in all of Belgium. What this means is that we’re finally adding our own layer of content to the game and it’s a very exciting time that feels like a new “aha” moment.

The second reason is that we want to release a game that is better than what we originally anticipated. Obviously our goal was always to deliver a great game, but our vision has evolved as the project took life. The first showings of the game and your feedback gave us new ideas which will ultimately allow us to improve our original design in several ways. The trade-off is that we need more time.

In regards to the development, we’re designing and integrating a brand new layer of content: that covers all those things that never existed in Creatures before and that will make Creatures 4 a good game by its own merits. We want to bring new interactions with the environment and bring a sense of palpable evolution to the Norns.

It’s clear to us that the focal point of the series is breeding generations of Norns which are increasingly more capable of handling themselves and their world. How can we encourage that, how can the world around the Norns react to their evolution, etc. These are the kind of things we’re dealing with right now. The ultimate goal here is to avoid the over-complexity of Creatures 3 while extending its gameplay.

And since it’s now the time to shoot for ideas, we have a couple of questions to which we think you guys will answer better than anyone. We’re genuinely interested in gathering a lot of great user experiences we know are important to a Creatures game player. So…

What is the coolest or the most advanced thing you’ve ever done, tried to achieve or wished you could do in one of the previous Creatures game?

It can be anything: breeding a über cool or super intelligent Norn, do something with the environment, messing up with the ecosystem, you name it. Though I’d like you to limit this to what the previous games offered as standard content and tools. This is not a “suggest the next feature” kind of thing but more of a “tell us why it’s cool for you”.

Inversely, what is the most boring/frustrating/disappointing experience you had?

That’s it, comment below and thank you for your support!

You command a band of brothers from the Royal British Expeditionary Forces as the defender of the Free World. Your troops must take to the field and defend your bunker from being overrun. Use the trenches on the battlefield to hold your ground in the no man’s land. Lead riflemen, mortarmen, snipers and machinegunners into a certain death to conquer futile dirt inch by inch. War is hell; welcome to purgatory.

The popular iPhone/iPad (that we created on iPad BTW) hit now lets you drop mustard gas on your loved ones using the Wiimote. Make no mistake though, this ain’t no lazy cell-phone port. Trenches Generals has been designed for the Wii from the ground up and has received extra care and polish compared to its mobile counterparts. 2-player split-screen combat is enabled, A.I. is tremendously more advanced and there’s a new Skirmishes mode that even features zombies. Zombies, baby!

C’est près de 10 minutes de séquence vidéo pour une journée complète de tournage dans nos locaux. D’autres sociétés sont bien entendues mise en avant, l’autre studio emblématique en Belgique, Larian Studios et les classiques Ubisoft ou Insomniac. Si vous ne connaissez rien au monde du jeu vidéo, cette émission vous permettra de découvrir ce qui se passe derrière le miroir et a été très bien réalisée.

La version complète est disponible via ce lien: http://www.rtltvi.be/video/362649.aspx

Hi Creatures fans!

We’re finally back from Gamescom and it’s been an incredibly exhausting yet satisfying experience. The Creatures 4 team worked extremely hard to get the game to the state it was at the show and while we’re still far from our goal, most of the guys on the team have not slept for some time and really worked their ass off to deliver the demo on time.

Since the lid on the project PR has been lifted I can now talk more freely about the game and give you most of the information you’ve been eagerly waiting for. Before reading on, please keep in mind a couple of important points:

Creatures 4 is more than a new chapter in the series. It’s a complete reboot for the Creatures IP and this means several things I will tackle in this post; most of all, it means that we wish the game to be an evolving product which will hopefully stay with us a long time. Free-to-play games  live as long as there are players to support them and who allow us developers to listen to community requests and feedback to make the game better and richer with content. We see the initial version of the game as a starting point which we will improve upon with updates and new content.

So, let’s get to it…

How the Creatures 4 project was born and what about Mr.Grand

We get this question quite a lot and it’s a good starting point in my opinion. Thanks to some community members, I‘ve learned there have been previous attempts to revive the Creatures games in the past (commercially I mean) with at least another development studio on the project. Surprisingly, Creatures 4 is in no way related to any previous attempts to create a new Creatures game.

Actually the project’s idea came from Fishing Cactus. Several of us here are fans of the series and at one point we were talking about which “old” game series would fit in today’s ever-shifting gaming market. Creatures was one of these and we decided to try our luck and contact Gameware about it.

While understandably on the fence about it at first, Gameware was very open about discussing ideas and their stance was “surprise us and we’ll talk”. It took Fishing Cactus some time but we finally came up with a very early, new vision for the game, one that was based on current gaming trends: iOS, Facebook, free to play and whatnot. This was almost two years ago.

I think that our work convinced Gameware that we meant good and that they could trust us with the project and allowed us to go ahead and search a funding partner for the game.

Some months later, Bigben Interactive came into play. When we pitched the project to them, very quickly they saw potential into the project and how passionate we were about it and decided to move forward with us. For those that don’t know Bigben, this is a publisher that traditionally works on game accessories and accessories-related games. Free to play and AI-simulations aren’t their cup of tea and their willingness to take on this adventure with us says a lot about their belief in the project. On top of that, their knowledge of merchandising and accessories made awesome stuff like the Gamescom figurines possible. Hopefully we’ll get to do many more figurines and goodies when the game is released: Creatures 4 is a game that is suited to this kind of collectibles.

Another question we’re getting a lot (understandably) regards Mr. Steve Grand involvement with the project. This will disappoint some of you but up to this point we’ve had no contact with Mr.Grand and I don’t think he is related in any “official” way to the Creatures series anymore but I’m not privy to the details there so don’t flame me about this (you can about other stuff though ). We are very respectful of the work he and his team have accomplished and we’re definitely carrying this over to Creatures 4.

To answer a very passionate email about it sent to us by CosmicSpore, yes, he’ll be in the credits as most of our work is based on the incredible things he did with the series waaaaay before we got to it. The more we get our hands in the original code, the more impressed we are with it and there’s no way we’re not acknowledging that.

If you’re still not convinced, Fishing Cactus is betting a lot on this project: up to some time ago we were mainly focusing on the mobile market while moving slowly to consoles and generally “bigger stuff”. As of now, Creatures 4 is our biggest project yet and we see it as THE project that will allow a small indie developer like us to emerge in a very crowded market where we learned that the best way to succeed is by listening to the players while keeping a strong focus.

Creatures 4 is as much a big deal for you as it for us, we’ve been living 24/7 with this game for several months and we still have a long way go, there’s no way we could do that without loving it so much. For the anecdote, Julien Hamaide, our chief engineer, was happy to bar “working on the Creatures AI” from his “things to do before I die list”.

Some facts about the release date and supported platforms

The game is planned to be released at the start of next year on iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPodTouch), PC (online client), Mac (AppStore, online client). I’m vague about a date as we need to see how much time we still need to accomplish the quality we’re aiming for. We are still investigating the online platforms for PC to see which one answers our needs the best.

Many people are requesting Android/PS3/Toaster/Fridge ports. All of these are possible but nothing’s set yet and we’ll need to see the response to the game before taking any decisions. Ultimately Bigben calls the shots in regards to financial decisions.

A boxed version will be released for PC shortly after the online release. It will include all the old chapters in the series (1, 2, 3, DS at least), a goodies of some sort and the equivalent of the game’s price in in-game credits. We don’t have more details about this yet.

Graphics and World

It’s 3D, yey!

Seriously, it’s more than a simple makeover as we hope we’ll be able to make the Norns feel even more alive with current animations techniques which are obviously more advanced than what was possible with 2D sprites. Think about facial animations for example.

There will be 5 environments to play on the game’s release. You saw the treehouse, I can say there’ll be a “hatchery” environment and more details about the other three will come in time. We’re definitely taking notes of your suggestions on Facebook though J

We’re still thinking about the ecology and what to make of it. Our idea is that it needs to be linked to the gameplay to be relevant and more integrated with the content.  We know it’s a big part of the Creatures appeal but in our opinion in can be made more relevant to game itself and more than simple decoration.

Free to play model

This is a big point and one of the main differences with the previous games. Creatures 4 is a free-to-play game and this means several things that will most likely shock/upset/depress those of you that are completely happy with a classic buy-to-play game.  Please give it the benefit of the doubt; the transition might be easier than you think. We’re ourselves a bunch of hardcore gamers and we haven’t sold our soul to the devil or whatever, we just think this model works both for us and the user base.

• A Creatures 4 online profile will be required to play so that the game will be able to keep track of all the relevant data (progress, currency, etc.)
• There will be a leveling system linked to the player’s progress. The player’s level will increase as in-game goals are completed. Higher levels mean new unlocked content in the Shop and in the machines (more customization options for example).
• There will be an in-game Shop that will house all the content you will be able to insert into the game: toys, genetic mutators, food, medicine… Most of this is still being designed so don’t take this as final.
• There will be two currencies in the game: Coins, which are gathered in-game with various interactions. Golden Eggs which are either received in the game on special occasions or bought in packs from the in-game Shop in exchange for real money. Golden Eggs will allow buying some stuff from the Shop (a payment option in Coins will be available too) and speed up production cycles in machines.
• All the content will be free, provided you have enough Coins/Golden Eggs to pay for items in the shop. Most (if not all) the content will be available for a set number of Coins so you can get all the content just by playing. Players willing to get things faster than they would by simply playing the game will have the option to do that by spending Golden Eggs. Practical example, let’s say you want your hatchery to create a new Egg, it will take a variable amount of time depending on the Norn breed you chose. You will be able to speed the hatching process by using a Golden Egg or simply waiting for it to complete.

For those of you that are familiar with social games, the model we chose is fairly classic stuff. I know some of you see it as controversial as social games have several detractors. In truth we believe this business model has several advantages. First of all it makes the game really accessible to a lot of players who can play the game for free and still experience all the content. Not all gamers know about Creatures and this is the best way to get people on board (after delivering a great game of course).  Also, to give you a little bit of developer’s insight, one of the reasons we chose the free-to-play model is that it ensures we’re getting a regular income that will allow us to provide continuous updates to the game and do some basic stuff like, you know, eat

A full-content “pay 50$ to play” version is definitely possible in the future but not planned at the moment.

State of the demo

The state of the Gamescom demo was very early in terms of polish. We wanted to introduce the player to some of the game features and by doing that we ended up driving the player through a series of guided steps. In hindsight, we probably should have offered a simple sandbox with the Norns living and doing their Norn-ish things.

Still, it was really heart-warming to see people laugh in front of the game. Creatures 4 seemed quite popular with women and kids!

The customization interfaces you saw were meant to show our system’s possibilities in terms of procedural texturing and body morphing. While we will offer the player a lot of customization options, these will come progressively as the player levels up. Natural breeding (no customization) will still play a big role as it will be the only mean to get unexpected results like random mutations and so on.

Complexity vs Accessibility

The Creatures games have always been very complex. Creatures 3 was awesome in many ways but it also managed to lose a lot of players due to its complexity. One of our major goals is to build on the existing foundations while making the series accessible to a new audience. No easy feat let me tell you!

The major change here will be a series of objectives which will need to be completed to advance and unlock new content. These will be designed to be very short-term and initially they will offer guidance among all the game features and mechanics before opening up to the full sandbox experience.  This won’t be a tutorial but an evolutionary process that will give you all the tools to achieve what you want in the game.

Achievements will be a part of it too and will encourage experimenting with the tools and machines.

AI and DNA

It’s still all here, rest assured. We’re recoding some of the tools for ourselves. We’re certainly not dumbing this down, but we’re still thinking about what the players will be able to do with all this from inside the game and how to keep it reasonably simple to grasp (those of you that messed with Norn genetics know it can be pretty daunting right?).

Proof below …

User Generated Content

This one’s another critical point. We know the importance of it for the Creatures community but it’s simply not possible for us to support user-generated content on the initial release.

First of all, badly handled, user generated content would be disruptive for the game as it would mess up the free-to-play-model balancing. Secondly, working on tools to make the game open to modification is a big deal: it requires a lot of time and a larger investment than we can afford right now without being sure the game will meet a large enough audience first.

Don’t lose hope though; we have some ideas on how to open the game in the future: we’re looking at what Valve did with Team Fortress, allowing users to produce and distribute content in the game and actually support that process. There are very good ideas there and we’ll be looking in that direction in the coming months.

And also, hopefully the customization options in the game will keep you busy in the meantime

Norn races, Ettins, Grendels

As you’ve probably heard/read, we’re bringing our own ideas to the Creatures world, with 5 Norn breeds, two of which were available in the Gamescom demo. Each breed will be linked to an environment and will have a unique visual look.

We’ve come up with a breeding system that allows mixing these Norn breeds to create millions of combinations in terms of color, fur, body shape and genetics.

While Grendels and Ettins won’t be in the initial release of game, I think it’s pretty much clear that they’re high up in the wanted features list of the community and thus high up in our todo list as well for after the game is released. Once again it all comes down to how the game will perform.

Social features

I can’t go into much detail about this at the moment but we’re definitely including some social features (sharing Norns is the first on the list). Again, more info about this soon.

That’s it…

I think I’ve touched the major points.  Feel free to comment but please don’t get mad if we’re not answering…

We don’t have a community manager here so we’re taking time off from production to handle emails and comments. This is not ideal and soon a dedicated Creatures 4 website will be available so we’ll be able to better answer your questions about the game.

Before ending this post, let me express our gratitude: we are doing our best to deliver a great game and your support matters a great deal to us. So do what you can to spread the word, I’m confident that in the end both you and us will be happy on how the game will turn out.

]]> http://blog.fishingcactus.com/index.php/2011/08/22/the-uncensored-truth-about-creatures-4/feed/ 161 http://blog.fishingcactus.com/index.php/2011/08/11/creatures-4-1st-screenshot-creature-artwork/ http://blog.fishingcactus.com/index.php/2011/08/11/creatures-4-1st-screenshot-creature-artwork/#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:10:39 +0000 Bruno Urbain http://blog.fishingcactus.com/?p=1446 So it is official, we’ll be at GamesCom with an early demo of Creatures 4, our amazing AAA Free to Play game coming on Mac, PC, iPhone & iPad and based on the Creatures series! BigBen Interactive, our publisher, has planned several square meters of space on its stand to feature the game and let you play it, no pressure here

We know we already have tons of people asking for this game with great expectations/ideas/features and we are reading all those comments very carefully. The demo is still very early (several months from release) and there is still a lot to be done and we hope you guys will find it exciting. Just keep in mind that this is just a glimpse of what we are going to bring.

However Fishing Cactus team is working like crazy to make this possible and start building the excitment (two guys are just leaving as I write this blog post after an all nite long crunch).

Also last but not least, enjoy one of the first screenshot of Creatures 4 as well as the revamped Norn. We truly hope you’ll like them as much as we do!

We had some really interesting talks, especially about the animation driven by the AI. For instance we could see the parametric animation system developed in the “CRY Engine”. When I saw this, the first day of the conference, I was impressed, seeing locomotion animations moving around by blending a couple of animations together to get a realistic behavior. The graphical animator do not have to depict all the animations required for a character to run, while turning and climbing hills.

But the next day, when came the turn of Simon Mack to speak about the “Euphoria Engine” of Natural Motion, I was literally stunned.

Euphoria is an engine used for animating 3D characters in a way that the gestures look very natural and coming from a real person. Unlike the classic key frame animation, which involves a static animation, this system allows each character to play the animation in a unique way.

The engine is based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis, which is a technique that generates the motion of the character by applying different constraints on it (like for the ragdolls). Euphoria uses a complex biomechanical model, simulating the skeleton, its joints, and the muscles. To drive the skeleton, the engine uses neural networks as controllers to determine the forces to apply. And to make it more intelligent, the controllers are chosen by some genetic algorithms which pick the fittest controller over multiple generations and trials. But it also allows the animator to give some expressive behavior to the character, like preservation of itself, or keeping its balance while knocked by others.

So in order to build a new character in your game with Euphoria, you first need to create a new controller for it. For this, you will have to tweak the parameters of the neural network controlling the body. Then you will need to tweak the fitness function of the genetic algorithm in order to take into account your new controller. Then the animator will have to give a behavior to your character which fits the best in your game.

Have a look on the amazing result you can get from this piece of technology:
Euphoria – Natural Motion

Rockstar uses Euphoria in its game GTA IV, to control the pedestrians. We can see them trying to dodge a car which is about to hit them, or protecting their head while falling on the ground if the car managed to hit its target. And more recently, the game BackBreaker also uses it, to give natural animations to the players, when they hit each other’s by blocking the legs for example.

By combining, AI with physics and biomechanics, Euphoria brings some really interesting possibilities to the game and movie industry.

You’re a film maker and your Movie has been supported by Wallimage? You are on track to get up to 70.000 € subsidies from Creative wallonia for Cross Media Marketing and communication.

http://www.wallimage.be/newsfile.php?lang=uk&id=427

The good news is that Fishing Cactus has been selected to help you with your advergaming and ARG (Alternate Reality Games) ideas and solutions.

Because we know it could be a little difficult to get started, we are there to help you define your need and brainstorm on potential campaign ideas.

The deadline for the submission of the project is set at the end of August and time is running fast, so contact us to increase you chances of being selected and promote your movie with the latest tech available!