In Algo-Bot, you’re given control of a little robot dude. You don’t control him directly, you don’t make him jump on mushrooms by pressing a single button either. Instead, you set up a sequence of orders for him: go straight, turn left, go straight again, turn right, etc … . When you’re done creating your little sequence, you pass it onto the robot: it will go around the power plant, following your orders. In a nutshell, the player manipulates sequential commands to order Algo-Bot around in an attempt to reach the given goal of the level.
Of course, your little robot can’t just roam freely, it has a job to perform. It must carry around toxic containers, sort them out and re-arrange them, and call on smaller robots to help him when he has too much. And you have to provide him with orders for every step that he takes.
Imagine the following situation: you have to get your robot around a specific arranged path, and you can see that this path is repeated a few times along a mission. What you have to do thus is to create a separate sequence of orders that you call each time you want the robot to go through that path. Exactly like how functions work in real programming! By solving small problems in the game, you’re learning the logic behind it all. You’ll be able to play with programming concepts such as variables, functions, conditions and groups.
So that’s our Algo-Bot for you. We’re currently in finalization stage with this Serious Game and we hope to deliver it by the end of the month. Be sure to check it out when it comes out! We’ll of course keep you abreast when it does.
Have you ever wanted to learn programming, but were too intimidated to give it a try? Were you turned off by the logic intricacies that programming requires? Well, here at Fishing Cactus, we are currently working on a Serious Game that will help you with that. The game is about Algo-bot, a cool little robot that’s here to teach you the basics of coding. So, grab your cup of coffee, here the story begins.
A few months ago, Technobeltasked us with making a game that would be used at their training center. So we set out to create a game that will help people grasp the essential skills of logic that the programming craft requires. And that’s how our little Algo-bot was born.
The Algo-bot world is one of leaking toxic containers, industrial crates and stubborn little robots. It takes place inside an unspecified power plant, in an unspecified future, with an unspecified number of hazardous things waiting for you. Fortunately, there is one thing that is specified: the gameplay!
We know how hard it can sometimes be to wrap one’s head around some of the concepts of programming (been there, done that, bought the t-shirt), so we made sure that you were appropriately supervised.
There are two characters in Algo-bot that will help you throughout the game: Tina, and the Director. Tina is the mechanical engineer of the power plant. She’s not afraid of getting her hands dirty, works hard, and likes to crack a good joke once in awhile. She’s there to help you learn the basics of the game and give you some tips when you get overwhelmed.
The director, as his name suggests, is the big boss of the power plant. He’s not funny. He’s stubborn and only concerned about one thing: efficiency in programming. He will remind you of that fact whenever an opportunity for optimization presents itself.
Next post, our designer will take you through the gameplay mechanics of Algo-bot right in this column. Come back for more later
Time has come to thank every single person who supported Fishing Cactus during this smashing year. Last year, we were in a hurry for sharing our wishes but this time, and because it’s beginning to look a lot like 2013 (and because we survived the 21st of December of course!), it seems like it’s the right time to have a look at what we have done this year and what’s coming for the new year.
Walking on a Cactus Wonderland
The time when we’ll put our spiky foot on the floor of the Fishing Cactus brand new building is approaching. Santa signed our loans and validated our plans. All we have to do now is to place the first concrete block. Planned for early 2013, we’ll of course celebrate it accordingly!
Fishing Cactus goes to China in 2013
Fishing Cactus just signed for a video games training in China from the 4th to the 15th of March. For the occasion, one Artist and one Game Designer will fly to Asia to represent us there and coordinate small art teams (think GameJam).
Tales From the gaming trenches
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when at the glow of their screens, the cacti asked themselves: “what have we done this year?”
First of all, we worked for a very well-known publisher (soon to be announced). The work we have been delivering opens us doors to other collaborations. You’ll learn more about the game by the end of January.
We collaborated with Reak-Lab and White Laser Games on a web browser game called Thormae. It should reach beta stage just before February. The team in charge of the game has spoiled their baby and it is now time to see all pieces come together for the final polishing phase.
Next, we are quite glad to say that Creatures 4 which we have been developing with Big Ben Interactive for more than a year is finally on a roll. After quite long wait, we are on the verge of signing a distribution deal with a big player in the online games industry who will be responsible for the distribution of C4.
Then, as many of you already know, Fishing Cactus has been working for a while on Serious Gaming. Our passion and our faculty to simply turn serious things into awesome games, gave us the opportunity to work on many different projects this year.
One of those projects that makes us very proud is called Algo-bot. The game aims to teach you, in a very Fishing Cactus fun way, the basics of programming logic. But we’ll tell you more about it on a next post
Last word
As you can guess, it has been a very interesting year and from the team point of view, things have been rockin’ around the Christmas Tree! Best wishes for 2013 and have a happy holiday!
Edit: The End of the World got delayed apparently. The Mayans must have mis-calculated the timeline; we know the feeling In celebration, we extend all promotions through Christmas!
Edit #2: Rumor has it that the World did end yesterday, but the government covered it up. Not sure what to believe anymore :-/
Christmas comes early this year as we’d like you to have at least a few days to enjoy our promoted titles before the End of the World, which apparently is scheduled by the Mayans for this Friday.
First of all, Swappin’: our iOS and Androidspelling game is now FREE to download! If you didn’t train your brain by playing it yet, this is your chance to die a bit cleverer. Wanna find out how it fares among other spelling games? Check out the AppAdvice quick review.
If you happen to be a French-speaking word-lover, you might also be interested in “Mots Croisés”, from our friends over at BigBen Interactive. It has also been dropped to FREE for the holidays season. Grab it now!
The last present is currently half-priced during the Holiday Season, also in partnership with BigBen. Judge Dee will bring you to medieval China in an iPad investigation game that is temporarily available for only US$ 3.99 (€ 3.59) instead of the usual US$ 7.99 (€ 5.99), for a limited time only!
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.
Here we go again for the last, but not the least, lesson of Creatures’ history. Today, let’s learn a bit about Creatures 3, the latest episode released… until we get to write our own chapter together with you folks
Living on their little coin-shaped planet, the Shee were not happy at all with the growing disturbances from the spreading Grendel species. Watching the stars, they spotted a fantastic spherical planet which looked much more impressive than Albia. Soon enough the Shee were on their way to Sphericus, embarked on an Ark with their creatures, the Norns and the Ettins.
However, approaching the planet of their dreams, the Shee found out that the Grendels’ Mother had snuck aboard. So they were forced to abandon the spaceship, leaving their poor creatures to their own fortunes.
Naturally it fell onto us, gamers, to help them again, educating those Norns as well as we could. Some of them were reluctant to say “gadget” because of a brain mutation but we did our best. Although we all ultimately failed to create an absolute balance within the spaceship’s environments, we still managed to create some amazing twins (identical or not). And that alone is pretty awesome!
In a word, the third opus of a pure gold series, although more technology focused, was still fantastic for expressing biological creativity, and was filled with a lot of humor and a touch of cuteness
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
Master Shee is calling you back to school and this time to teach you about the Docking Station incident.
This story related to the Lone Shee’s journey aboard his spaceship, the Capillata, looking for other members of his species all around the galaxy. And what a journey! Lone Shee took the opportunity to travel through the Warp. Many different worlds he visited and many beautiful Norns he managed to shelter in his spaceship. Some of them discovered, some of them created, each and every one of them extraordinary.
Lone Shee had a pleasing journey overall, except maybe for the lack of teas and cookies. However, he had never imagined that he’d find some Grendels in his own spaceship. But he did nonetheless! He wondered how they managed to get there and then begun to suspect that they knew about the Warp…
Helped by some incredibly scrappy Norns he knocked the intruders down but found they dropped something in the Capillata. While inspecting it, Lone Shee noticed a “B” marked on the surface of it and remembered a creepy old fairytale about some evil kind of Shee called Banshee. Could those things be some Banshee’s eggs? So, in the nick of time, he threw some eggs, through the Warp.
At last, landing on Sphericus, our mad scientist attempted his journey’s final act. He didn’t quite encounter what he was after though: staring at him with his ruby-red grindelish eyes, a Banshee welcomed him.
Oh, and one more thing… While touring space, Lone Shee crossed paths with weird species called Eyeball Invaders – Check that out over on Steam Greenlight (and do cast your vote! We need your help to make the cut. Lone Shee is ordering you to!)
(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!
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
So we’ve established that Algo-Bot is a game that will teach you the logic of programming. How are we going to do that without being dull and boring? That’s a very good question, and one that we actually asked ourselves when we took on the project. Luckily enough, we think we found the answer.
In Algo-Bot, you’re given control of a little robot dude. You don’t control him directly, you don’t make him jump on mushrooms by pressing a single button either. Instead, you set up a sequence of orders for him: go straight, turn left, go straight again, turn right, etc … . When you’re done creating your little sequence, you pass it onto the robot: it will go around the power plant, following your orders. In a nutshell, the player manipulates sequential commands to order Algo-Bot around in an attempt to reach the given goal of the level.
Imagine the following situation: you have to get your robot around a specific arranged path, and you can see that this path is repeated a few times along a mission. What you have to do thus is to create a separate sequence of orders that you call each time you want the robot to go through that path. Exactly like how functions work in real programming! By solving small problems in the game, you’re learning the logic behind it all. You’ll be able to play with programming concepts such as variables, functions, conditions and groups.
