Interview Fishing Cactus sur RTBF, pour La Semaine Du Jeu Vidéo

  • il y a 11 ans
Fishing Cactus Interview on national Belgian TV (subtitled in English). Includes long chats about Creatures 4.
Interview de Fishing Cactus, le studio de jeu vidéo belge, sur la RTBF, pour La Semaine Du Jeu Video. Inclut de longs passages à propos de Creatures 4!
Transcript
00:05Wow. Here we are entering the ultra-productive sphere of Fishing Cactus.
00:10Beware. They're working in here.
00:14Let's have a tour.
00:23Hi Pascal, how are you?
00:25Hi Charles. I'm fine. How about you?
00:28How long since we last met?
00:31It must be like 2 years and 25 employees ago.
00:33As you can see, we've grown a lot. We're now 32 in here.
00:36You have a mix of graphic artists and coders.
00:40And people who work in gaming know that those tend to fight a lot.
00:43Since we're among artists and mathematicians.
00:46Yet we let them share the same open space
00:54with management and everybody else, without walls or cubicles.
01:05Which allows everybody to contribute on what is going on
01:12and share ideas, regardless of their job title.
01:17It sometimes helps us avoiding mistakes, refining our work through multiple brains.
01:23There's a curating process of ideas that is empowering, organic and agile.
01:28The biggest project at Fishing Cactus right now is Creatures 4.
01:31Can you tell me more about this big project? I think it's your biggest so far,right?
01:35It's indeed our biggest development cycle to date.
01:38Usually on one game title, our contract length is 6 to 10 months.
01:45The scope is usually not that ambitious.
01:53On C4, it's been 24 months we're working on it already.
01:56From a time standpoint and in terms of complexity,
02:02it's the deepest, most elaborate and sophisticated title the studio has worked on.
02:08What's the main goal of the game? How do you complete it?
02:10There's no real end to Creatures 4. But there are stakes and objectives.
02:13You have to try and evolve a species, to help it populate a new planet.
02:17It's an imaginary species, that left their planet for another.
02:24They're trying to populate this new planet but there's not many of them to begin with.
02:32Your goal is to grow and educate the species to a point they can almost function on their own.
02:42So Creatures 4 is the big deal. They revisited the A.I. and took the best elements out of the first 3 installments.
02:49But what about the gameplay? Let's ask the game designers.
03:00We took the game concept an inch deeper, with an emphasis on complexity.
03:05We also reached out with the existing community, asked the fans what they wanted.
03:09They wanted more genetics, more genomes, more eco-system stuff -- And that's what we focused on.
03:13Compared to the old demo from last year GamesCom, we really got into those quirky scientific parameters that are the essence of the franchise.
03:25Those things that make the game so much more interesting than a standard pet game.
03:32For example, the critters are not roaming around mindlessly anymore. They can eat flowers or mushrooms from the tree and interact with the eco-system in multiple ways.
03:39You could take a critter from the treehouse and put it in the cave just to see what happens for instance.
03:46There are a lot of actions that are general -- here, we use the technical word "systemic" to refer to those --
03:52In the end, every little critter spawns genomes which subsequently helps the player create different breeds of Norns.
03:57Eventually the player will want to uncover all Norn breeds and experience all what the game has to offer.
04:02So, Sam, if the game is so complex and so feature rich, it's bit your fault, innit?
04:06It's a little bit my fault, you could say that. But there's a good chunk that comes from the original code we got ahold of.
04:13But it's true that we pushed the envelope, on the diversity of Norn behaviors for example.
04:21We developed a wide array of new behaviors for the Norns.
04:27As said before, the Norns have a brain.
04:33That brain can be trained in many distinct ways.
04:37A Norn could like to play with other Norns. Another Norn might prefer to hit the other Norns.
04:46Players will discover all these various instincts as he delves in.
04:51And there are many other little reactions like those to pay attention too. A Norn might water the plants, where another tends to destroy them etc.
05:05But Sophie, what is this?
05:08Creatures 4 cupcakes.
05:10Oh, you even made cupcakes for the game's release?
05:13Oh yeah, we're ready to roar.
05:15You sure seem to be!
05:18And at Fishing Cactus, when the last line of code has been entered... It's payback time!