For the past two weeks the team has been focused on improving the performances across the mobile devices. We�re now happy to have between 25 fps and 30 fps on all supported iOS devices. Some tradeoffs have been made (most notably, real time shadows) but the game looks great.

We�re adding sound effects for all the agents, improving the Splicing Machine and making the animation system more robust, efficient and glitch-free. We�re still working on all of these though.

We are also preparing for a new Gamescom demo. Hopefully it�s the last one ;-) It will likely be a very sandbox-y demo to allow us to focus on finishing up what is left to be done to complete the game.

Hi Guys!

Ready to know what has been done last week? ^^

So, we started working on the gamescom demo. We decided to make it a sandbox demo with some pre-placed content to avoid losing focus. Some demo-specific stuff always gets in: restart-timers, demo-specific main menu screen, local server for the booth etc.

- We’ve been working a lot on sound. We have four set of Norn voices now: the voice type is defined by which breed genes are the most present in the genome.

- A lot of work has gone into the creatures View UI. That’s when you’re in close-up view with a creature. The ergonomics weren’t good on mobile so we redesigned it as a scrollable list. The ability to check the chemicals of each product is still there of course.
We also added the major drives to be visible at all times so the variations are clearer.

- We are putting the finishing touches to a new animation system that makes performance better and fixes some glitches. It allows more variations and blending in facial expressions.

- We improved the kids/teen models which are not based on the adult ones anymore

Hi guys!

Sorry but because gamescom there won't be weekly update this week BUT... I got something from gamescom, something I was glad to see in the demo...

BABIES NORNS DON'T HAVE GIGANTIC HEADS ANYMORE! YAY!!!

Cheers!

Hi !

As you’ve figured the past few days we’ve been in holy-crap-it’s-demo-time mode.
That’s the kind of timeframe where you fix a lot of random stuff and try to make everything look, sound, behave as good as possible.
As you’ve seen in the update-related post, the kids are back in town

The demo itself was nice and quite stable. It highlighted some usability issues, especially in the understanding of the sandbox that we need to address as soon as possible. That’s the Creatures challenge right there, making the sandbox gameplay clear enough.

The Gamescom week itself saw part of the team moving to Germany for interviews (and schnitzels!) and the other part of the team getting some rest for their hard work. Still, some work has been done toward an optimized fur technique which will mostly benefit performance on mobile devices.

Cheers

Hello Creatures community

Last week saw the return from the GC demo which led to a day spent cleaning up all the hacky stuff from the demo.

The tech team started (and finished) working on a new tutorial system that proved necessary from out tests. It will be “darken-everything-except-the-button” kind of thing to guide the newcomers through the game at first. Now we need to create the content for it.

We also improved the ability to click on an object that is behind another object. The clocking-detection was previously based on the collision box which made selecting a Norn behind a plant very hard as the collision box of the plant would cover the Norn. Now the detection is based on the model itself which is WAY more precise and convenient.

Last but not least the new fur technique is almost done and now needs to be tweaked by the art team to achieve a good result.

Many bugs were fixed as well, from sound bugs to crashes.

Cheers :-)

Hello Guys!

Ok so, here is the weekly update. It is quite long, so, we will write it on bullet point.

- We put the finishing touches to the “overlay” tutorial system which during the initial part of the game allows us to darken areas of the screen and highlight those parts we want to focus the attention on. It will be used in the first few goals.
- We also finished the fur technique (better for performance) which actually looks nicer than what it did on PC in the past.
- Improved the Norn textures a lot.
- Implemented GameCenter for iOS (for achievements)
- Tweaked the resource loop for more clarity.
- We tweaked the first goals to focus on the Norn caring. Splicing and so on will come a bit later in the progression.
- Implemented a metrics tool to gather usage data. Not fancy stuff (and it’s transparent to the user) but it will allow us to see if there are issues or hurdles that pose a problem.
- Added several variations for animations between the Norns
- Produced final layout for the achievements page (need to produce it now)
- Fixed tons of bugs
- We’re still working in improving the lighting in the levels.
- Added a new template for ‘missions’. Some of them don’t require a long description and it allows us to further differentiate between missions that are meaningful for the main progression and simpler ones.
- Finished making the model-based picking (see last update) working on iOS.

Cheers :-)

Hi Guys!

Here is the information Andrea provided me

Overall these days it’s mostly about getting tons of things fixed.
The team mostly worked on making sure the same game can be played on several devices either as guest or logged in through a Gamecenter/Facebook identifier (that’s for the iOS version of course). This is a tricky thing as we have all the generated Norns, the progression data and script states to sync constantly. We’re not out of the woods there though: we still have corrupted syncs now and then and we’re tackling all these limit cases.
We’ve also worked on integrating a first batch of achievements and all is required to make purchases available in the game shop.
Part of the week was also focused on heavy bug fixing which is something we’re trying to integrate more regularly in our weekly schedule as the project nears its completion.

Playing on iOS still requires some work on ergonomics. The form factor is great (Creatures really feels at home visually on an iPad) but interacting with the Norns is less straightforward than it should be: asking them to perform an action on an agent is a bit cumbersome as it involves touch-pressing, waiting for a radial menu and swiping to the command.
It can get pretty annoying when you have several Norns and when you ask them to tickle/slap each other! As a result, we’re thinking about how to make this more straightforward.

Oh, last but not least, this week saw the departure of Robin, one of Creatures’ programmers, and the arrival of Marc who will replace him and will have a very good time learning Caos scripting and Norns’ genetics

Oh, and here’s the current look of a mixed-breed Norn….

What do you think of the fur?



We're working on variable fur length, we need to tie it to the genes. We'll have at least 3 or 4 lengths.

I am afraid there is not much interesting to say about the past week: we’re still in debugging fever…we call it « Mantis time” (Mantis is the bugtracker system we’re using^^).

Still a lot of work to do but we’re fixing a lot of stuff and we just delivered a build to our distributor’s QA so they can help in finding all the bugs and issues.

Feature-wise, a couple of notable things have been done:

- Basic achievements have been integrated with UI

- We capped the limit of eggs the Hatchery machine can contain. It got pretty crammed very quickly and it was way too easy to lose tracks of eggs. It also brings a bit of strategizing for which Eggs you want to keep, which ones you want to send to your friends or which ones you want to discard. The cap increases as you progress in the game and more egg slots can be unlocked with in-game coins (this is entirely optional and we won’t make the max-cap too constraining).

- The fur length is now dependent on the genes the Norn has and an average is done among them. Fur length is linked to the body shape (A 100% aquatic Norn doesn’t have fur for instance).

Cheers!

Hi Guys!

Sorry we are lat for this one.

This weekly updated covers a slightly longer time span as most of our work is still focused on bug fixing (sorry, I know you must be getting tired of this…)

Still, some things are worth mentioning on top of bug fixing. Following the feedback from QA and the issues we have with ergonomics on iOS, we’re working on what we call a “rubber-band” system that allows you to draw a line between the Norn and any agents. Release the finger press and the available commands appear (of course, commands are not coercive and the Norn can decide to wander off instead). The first prototyping phase is very encouraging: it’s way easier to ask your Norns to do something and it’s also way clearer to which Norn you’re asking it since you’re drawing a line between him/her and the agent.

As soon as the last issues are ironed out (camera scrolling when on the borders of the screen etc.) and the quality of this new system is ascertained we’ll add fancy graphics for the line itself which is currently just a debug thing.

Also, one concern is the distance from the “play area”, especially on smaller devices. As those of you who could test the game during shows may have noticed, we were working with two fixed zoom levels, a far one and close one with no in-between. So now making it possible to zoom freely between the two zoom levels and the closer one is WAY closer to the play area. It feels much better.

Last but not least, we got a new programming recruit from the Netherlands to help us out for a while, welcome Ferry!

Cheers!

Hello Creatures Community :-)

Here's the news you've been waiting for!

This week we’ve been working on improving the iOS ergonomics. As reported in the previous update, the “rubberband” control scheme has been implemented fully and works WAY better that the old system that was in place. We now have to implement the graphics for it and send it to QA for feedback.

We improved the reactivity of buttons on touch devices. Having tested the game for months (er, yeah, we can say years) we’ve grown accustomed to tapping/clicking the UI buttons but it turns out they lack the reactivity.
Very (un)interesting bugs include screen ratio issues on iPad3 on which we scale down the resolution to keep the performance good enough, bugs in placement of items, some bugs caused by the new way we handle the zoom and so on.

On the positives, we tweaked the Norn’s instincts to increase the will to take of their environment (altruism drive). We also fixed the pregnancy time to make it last longer than 15 seconds :-D Also, Norns had the tendency to get pregnant over and over again with little delay so we tweaked the genome so that is less likely to happen. By switching the Creatures code to our engine we changed some of the logic to be based on time rather than on ticks as in C3. We probably still have some bugs here and there linked to that transition.

That’s it for this week!
Cheers!

Hi all,

Sorry for the waiting! :-)

Debugging still continues at the moment on everything our QA friends spot.

The “rubber band” ergonomics are finished and definitely improve the gameplay on touch devices. The ergonomics have improved 10x.

A big performance boost on UI has also been accomplished, yet there’s still some room for improvement there.

The Norn instincts have been tweaked so that they are more likely to survive by themselves unless someone teaches them otherwise.

We've started implementing some of the Localization (English/German/French but more are coming) and seeing all the texts go out of bounds. Damn you, you long-worded languages! :-)

We also streamlined the Decoration UI to make it clearer.

To make amends for our lateness (for the update I mean ^^), double screenshot time.

Hello Community!

This week’s seen the departure of Samuel, he’s the crazy designer that worked on Creatures for the last two years and our resident-scientist. We all wish him good luck in his future endeavors!
His knowledge has been passed on to Lucas, our new designer that will have the pleasure of becoming a genome expert

Aside from the traditional debugging that takes most of our time (performance and all kind of game-breaking bugs) we embellished the iOS version with nice-looking rim-light effects. We’ve also been reworking the initial sequence of the game. Getting to hatch your first Norn egg is a bit too cumbersome at the moment: windows popping in your face, complicated UI, etc… We are streamlining the first 2 minutes in the game to improve the magic of it all.

Creatures is also featured at Paris Games Week. No surprise there, as announced it’s exactly the same demo as the one at Gamescom 2013. The cool photo booth is there as well!

Below, a screenshot of what the “rubber-band” controls look like on an iPhone. Keep in mind that once the finger is released over a target, you’ll then have access to the actions (verbs) the Norn can perform on that item (in the case of a critter that would be “tickle” and “hit”).

Cheers!

Hi!

These past few days we’ve met our publisher to discuss the next steps in development. We got some interesting feedback about the “Creatures View” (the close-up view with the Norn) not being interactive enough and the first few minutes in the game not being compelling enough. We’re outlining a short-term roadmap to improve this.

The build is getting more stable each day, still some crashes on iPhones but we’re getting there.

Everyone is pretty happy about the improvements in ergonomics but there are a few issues we want to iron out there. We’re unhappy on how the reward/punish mechanic is handled. It’s actually something we feel was not very good in the older chapter of the series as well. We’ve decided that we’re going to work on implementing a though bubble showing the action the Norn just did and the drive that triggered that; a “yes” and “no” button in the bubble will allow you to infer some education at any time. We think it will provide a lot of seamless and in-game feedback on what is going on with the Norn decision making process. More on that as soon as we seen it in the game in a few days.

We also made the each egg hatch by tapping. It’s a lot more gratifying. You can see below what it looks like with temporary asset. Oh it’s in our debug level we lovingly call “the void”. Of course you don’t have the 3D hand in the iOS build.

That’s it for now! Thanks!

Hi Guys,

Sorry we are late It's entirely my fault.

As we announced last week we’re working on the thought-bubble thing. We’re taking your feedback into account and as we said, we’re not touching the underlying system underneath, at all.

The current implementation helps in showing what the Norns are thinking and we’re adding some filtering to the information on display to prevent this system to be overwhelming and limited to Norns that are learning. It is definitely in need of some testing and hopefully we can show you how it looks in action soon.

This feature has also allowed us to clearly find and fix some weird stuff going on with certain stimuli that weren’t correctly set (for example, a grendel-shaped toy box that was adding chem fear 1.0… terrible!).

We’ve been improving the interaction with the Norn in the close-up view. The “tickle your Creature” feel is way better now and there we added some nice animations there, we’re in the process of improving the slapping now. It’s definitely a feature targeted at the mainstream audience for the game but the view itself is very nice to see the details of your Norns and interact with them. There’s also a button to ask “express” to your Norn.

Part of the team is still on improving the first moments of the game in which we guide the player through the first egg: making sure you’re not distracted by too much UI, prevent tutorial-breaking actions, etc. (This whole phase lasts +-5 minutes).

Regarding the next update, I'll be in France with Algo-Bot at the SGE13, so, I won't be able to post the weekly update. But, I asked Andrea and he will kindly do it for me :-)

Cheers!

Hi !
Taking over for Sophie today! (and I'm putting this week's dates since it's focusing on this past few days' of work).

* We are still polishing the interaction with the Creatures. Slapping is implemented and polished, and the kits can slide in and out to clear the view and give more space to the Norn (that’s very useful on smaller screens).

* We’re adding more particles effects as well to highlight some events in the game (cookie crumbs, slapping feedback, etc.)

* The thought bubble implementation is good enough to test it. It gives a correct overview of what is going on now. It feels a bit awkward to play though: if you come to the game as a newbie, seeing your Norn says “I’m tired so I eat a fruit” turns out to be a bit confusing so we’re figuring out how to frame this information in a more straightforward manner.

* We had a major breakthrough in memory management and the game will be way more stable in the longer play sessions thanks to this.

*To answer the question in last week’s weekly update discussion, we still can’t confirm a release date unfortunately as we’re still not happy with the game yet. Creatures is a very challenging project in many respects and while we’re doing our best, we wholeheartedly appreciate your understanding and patience.

That’s it for this week! Have a great weekend everyone

Heya !

Weekly update from last week, a bit late as we’re in a pretty focused moment.

We’re preparing a build for a two days playtest that will take place in a dedicated lab in about a week.

We’re focusing on ergonomics, gameplay, stability and polish to get some feedback on the things we told you about in the past few weeks. If that test turns out to be positive we’re moving on to polishing the splicing and breed part of the game.

The work we’ve been doing is always the same broad mix of bug fixing and polishing. Adding “tap here” indicators where needed, improving some visuals like the speech bubbles and fixing tons of small issues that stack to create a HUGE bug list.

About the thought bubble, for now we are settled on showing tiny thought bubble that once they are pressed display the category icon and the verb the Norn has performed on it. The user can the press the reward or punish buttons accordingly.

The bubble only comes up when a Norn performs an action on its own (and if the action weight goes past a certain threshold the bubble doesn’t appear). When you ask a Norn to do something and the Norn actually does it the reward stim is implicitly set (and shown with some feedback).

All in all I have to say it works nicely: you get the opportunity to teach actively by asking your Norn to do stuff while you can also have a laid back approach and only intervene if you want by tapping the tiny thought bubbles. Also, at any moment you retain the ability to go into a close-up view and tickle/slap your Creature.

The information you get is not overwhelming and it’s clearer what actions the Norn has been performing. The tradeoff is that the action/drives relationship is not displayed but I feel it is better off this way: that relationship is what creates the Norn’s own personality and as some of you pointed out, that mystery is part of what makes the Creatures’ charm.

Cheers!

Hi!

Two-week updates this time…we’ve been constantly rushing to provide today’s test playtest build so the communication duties took a bit of a delay. Nothing standing out particularly but tons of things ranging from visual polish to under-the-hood improvements, texts, localization (playtest is conducted in France) etc.

We've been polishing and bug fixing stuff all over the place, especially the tutorial part and ergonomics which are the main focus of the playtest.

I’m actually coming back from the playtest myself and so far so good, people seem to like what they’re playing. There are certainly flaws in the how we explain certain things and the initial part of the game (before it opens up) is far from perfect but it’s encouraging.

There’s a second playtest session coming up tomorrow and we’ll review all the feedback next week.

Hopefully this test run will provide us with answers to questions such as:
- Are the touch-ergonomics working?
- Is the information that we display clear enough?
- Do players get what they can do to tend to the Norn’s needs?
- Is the screen space not too cluttered on small screens?
- Do people like the look/music/feel of the game?

On top of reviewing the feedback, next week we are planning to resume working on the splicing machine, norn collection (still need a better name for that, any ideas?) and the whole “get tons of different Norn” gameplay…we want it to be great because it’s our single biggest new feature in the game.

After that most people here at Fishing Cactus will be on Xmas break so it will be a slow rest of the month I guess.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Hi Community!

During the course of last month the Creatures team has been focusing on polishing the initial part of the game (until the players finished the tutorial for OUR FIRST FU***N’ PLAYTEST. Ahhhhhhhh feels good to say it ;-)

The goal for us was to verify that all the changes in the ergonomics that we made in the last months actually performed as expected. Turns out it’s the case, yippeekayay! Players found the game quite easy to manipulate considering it’s a 3D game with dynamic camera and living creatures going about their business.

Certain things were definitely not understood, some things need to be changed, some goals were not clear, some things are definitely working not as well as they should and well…there’s still work to do!

But we’re fairly happy with the results and simply the fact of getting some feedback is great.
The next thing we’re tackling is the long-term value of the game and monetization. More info about all this next month!

Last but not least, Gauthier is a dad, OMG!

Cheers! And merry Christmas!

Happy new year everyone!

A small part of our team continued working on the game during Christmas break and the rest of us got back this week.

We’re working on what we will hope will be a beta candidate.

Part of the team has been working on gameplay features linked to the splicing. We’re making the splicing machine more intuitive while keeping the cool helix representation that you can see in the screenshots around the web. We’re also creating packs of genes that go in the shop.

Some of the genes (cosmetic ones for now) will be earned in-game through the creation of Norns in the splicing machine, completing quests etc. Gene packs will provide a random selection of genes for you to use in the machine.

We’re also adding social networking features like Facebook and Twitter support. These will bring classic features like sharing important events in the game and adding friends to your game. The latter allows you to share your eggs.

Last but not least, we made it possible for the game content to be updated seamlessly with no need to update the whole game client. This only affects the content (store items, breeds, etc.), not the actual game executable which will still needed to be patched if (more like, when) bugs show up.

That’s it for this week,

Have a great week!

Hi Everyone!

This week we continued polishing the Splicing machine, making sure every functionality is in there. Also completing the social networks integration. Everything is not good-looking yet but the functionalities are all done.

We started working on one of the last game features planned for release which is visiting your friends’ world. The current implementation is very straightforward and to move towards a first release, we decided to keep it simple and limit it to checking out your friend’s World and Norns. We’ll probably develop this feature further in the future but for now we’re focusing on more pressing matters.

This is a shorter week than usual for us as Fishing Cactus is moving to a newly-constructed office tonight and tomorrow. Monday will probably be a “get all the infrastructure running again” kind of day. We’re very excited since developing in an old window-less truck depot for 3+ years has lost its charm.

This is a sad weekly update for me as I have to announce that I will be leaving Fishing Cactus at the end of this month after 4.5+ years of incredible experiences with a bunch of great friends.

I was planning on leaving after Creatures Online release and I was looking forward to get the feedback from the community firsthand…as you know the project has taken longer than expected and I have been delaying my departure for a while. But the time has come for me to move on and bid farewell.

I’ve been working on Creatures with tons of passion since the beginning and despite the difficulties you’re all aware of, I’m super proud of what we’re accomplishing and of having played my part in the growth of not only a great project but also a great company that has given me so much in return.

I also feel very lucky for having the chance to work on such a great IP and getting to meet the nicest community ever. You've been very supportive all-along and I can’t thank you enough for that. You've redefined what passionate means to me and I will miss working on this game! The few times I was able to personally meet some Creatures fans are still some of the best highlights of my game developer’s life.

Worry not for Creatures Online though! Starting next month, our CEO Bruno will personally overview the end of development and during the next two weeks I will be doing everything necessary to make sure the transition happens smoothly.

It’s been a great adventure for me! Thank you

Have a great weekend!

Hello everybody,

As you don't know me for now, let's start with a quick presentation. I'm Lucas, and I am working on Creatures Online as a game designer. I may be new on this forum, but as for the project, it has been 2 months since I started to work on it. I also love dark chocolate and red pandas.

Some of you were wondering who will continue the weekly updates since Andrea leaves Fishing Cactus by the end of this month (good luck for the future, Andrea ). It will be my task to do these weekly updates.

So, what's new since last week ?

The splicing machine is now functional. There still are some bugs (and I have no doubt we will discover some others, that's the joy of developing games ), but it works. You can now "splice" a Norn to get him back changed. The more genes you change, the more time the splicing will last. So if you are a breeding mad scientist, having a lot of Norns / eggs could help you. Just splice a Norn who already has similar genes, and you won't have to wait for too long.

There is a sandbox feeling when playing Creatures, so once the tutorial is done, the player is free to do what he wants. We ensured there still is a main progression : when leveling up or completing new entries in the Norn collection, you unlock new genes.

We also simplified some interfaces for the splicing machine. Now, when a splicing is in progress, you don't have to open the splicing interface to check if it is finished : a bubble above the splicing machine tells you how much time is remaining.

That's all for this week ! Have a great week-end

Hello everybody !

Sorry for the late update. Last week was crunch time ! Some playtests are planned soon, so we have done some intensive debug.

There was also two improvements :

The first one is about the Norn collections screen. All Norns on these pages were in the same pose. But now, it is different ! As you can see below, Norns pictures have been changed. I personnaly like the Norn pointing at the right .


The second improvement is about the main user interface in the game. Now all the main options are accessible from two tabs in the bottom right corner of the screen. There is the "main menu" tab, and the "genetics" tab (with buttons for the hatchery machine, the splicing machine and the Norn collections). It is easier to navigate through the menus this way, and the game looks better with less buttons visible on the screen.


That's all for this week. Have a nice day !

Hello everybody !

It will be a short update today: this week, we essentially did some debug. There was a lot of bugs, but we managed to get rid of most of them. We had to make sure the game is playable as there will be some playtests in two weeks. We had a Benjamin Button’s bug where a Norn get out of the splicing machine younger than he was before, for example .

Above all, we made sure the player cannot be blocked during the tutorial. It was possible to spend a fortune in cookies and be blocked when the game asks you to buy a ball, for example.

Well, I know it would be better to announce new features than just "some debugging was going on", but the fact that we are focusing on fixing features than adding features, someway, is a good new. .

We will still try to have something more consistent to provide to you for the next Friday!

Hi Guys!

It's been a quite long time! How are you community?

Lucas is on day off today so, I am glad to post the weekly update the team wrote for you

This week we did some changes linked to performances issues. For example, some texture’s generation now is done while the game loads. It will avoid some frame rate drops due to a texture being loaded in-game.

We are also working on the locomotion. The main idea is to avoid some situations where the Norn is blocked or walks in slow-motion.

Finally, we are currently working on a way to notify the player when a Norn present in another environment is close to death. It is not a good surprise to find a tomb where once your favorite Norn stood.

Have a nice weekend !

Hello everybody !

This week, we continued to work on the notifications when a Norn is dying. It is finished technically speaking, but the graphics used are placeholders for now.
So, if a Norn is dying :
- there will be a small notification popping on the right part of the screen,
- in the world monitor screen (which allows you to go from a world to another), there will be a "!" above worlds in which there is a dying Norn.

This way, you should be able to react in time when a Norn is dying somewhere.

We also made sure genes you don't have discovered for now appear as "unknown".
This allow you to receive Norn eggs from friends no matter their genes. This way you won't be restricted in your eggs exchanges .

That's all for this week. Have a nice weekend !

Hello everybody ,

We fixed various glitches this week.

We’re also tweaking the prices of the objects in the shop: to spend a whole day on an Excel document is also a part of a game developer's job^^.

Some QA tests are planned, they will start this Monday. For those who wonder, QA tests are mainly about testing the game main features and report bugs, it is different from playtests in which testers will usually really play the game.

We also fixed some issues with locomotion (the way the Norns move in the level) but, to be honest, it is not an easy task. As for now we still have some Norns walking in slow-motion near some objects, but it is less frequent than before.

That's all! Have a nice week-end .