Monthly Archives: September

Here are some of Coobico’s ubiquitous non-player-characters, from whom players can acquire quests; quests are an important part to Coobico, as they represent the players’ current tasks – from angling fishes for a local innkeeper, to digging out treasures, to building a new street or structure.
Upon completion of a quest the player earns in-game money and experience. What’s more, the avatar’s happiness-score is raised (players should always keep an eye on the current happiness of their avatars).



Judge Dantes
Can be found at the cityhall. Dr. Dantes acts a some kind of town council and issues new building permits and settlers’ quests to players.

Count Vrykulas
Dwells in the House on Haunted Hill with his hunchbacked deaf and mute manservant. The count is one of the island’s oldest inhabitants. In fact, nobody knows for sure how long he really resided there already. Rumour has it that Count Vrykulas puts a curse on his lesser fortunate guests every now and then.

Albert the Butler
Albert, Dr. Qubus old butler, occupies and maintains Qubus’ Mansion and its machines with a bulk of Q-Bots after their master’s disappearance in an alchemic accident. Albert also assists new players during their registration-process.

More NSCs to come in part two…

Newly released MMO-Blog Worlds in Motion, part of CMP Media, recently wrote an article about Coobico: Getting Casual with Coobico. This week we sat down with editor Leigh Alexander to talk about the peculiarities of creating a casual MMO for a non-teen audience:

“‘More’ is the typical game-industry’s approach to everything: more levels, more graphic power, more customization and even moreso, intertwining features. Here is a lesson that the game-industry can learn from the Web 2.0-world—less is more, really,” Winter opined. “Less is what a casual audience of above-30-year-olds are looking for. They don’t want to waste their time and money on upgrading graphic-hardware just to play Crysis in all its beauty. They are looking for some thirty minutes of ease and challenge besides their working-life, their family and hobbies, instead of spending endless hours of grinding in an online-game.”

Communities are the key to online worlds, Winter says—and the current community within MMOs currently reflects, he notes, the industry’s “max-out principle,” where the learning curve to fully engage in the virtual society is steep. “This doesn’t mix well socially with the casual market,” Winter says. “Such social discrepancies—almost like culture shock—are among the biggest shortcomings of recent multiplayer-products.”

Read more at Worlds in Motion: Linking People’s Lutz Winter Talks Casual Adult MMO

Besides its human settlers, Qubus’ Island is home to strange dwellers. Some of them are rumored to be created by Dr. Qubus in an alchemical mishap.
You can choose to play Coobico as one of the weird and wilful but friendly members of the mysterious tribe of stone-golems found on Qubus’ Island. These giants are rough and tough on their rocky hide, but soft inside their big hearts. They are towering more than ten feet tall and will be catered to with their own collection of accessoirs.





Meet the Q-Bots: they were created as industrious little helpers by the island’s former owner, Dr. Qubus. After his mysterious disappearance, Qubus’ bots got left behind, keeping his facilities in good shape and mining for valuables. Not exactly playable characters, Q-Bots are personally assigned to each player as an auxiliary and sidekick, providing explanations and how-tos.

City-building is Coobico’s main theme, somewhat comparable to games like The Settlers or MySims. But it’s city-building inside out: you can establish your own settlement on Qubus’ Island (or join another player’s estate), while managing your avatar’s life and his or her wellbeing, belongings and pets in a roleplaying-ish fashion.
When exploring the surroundings with your avatar, you will eventually discover other settlers and their villages—other players with whom you can compete or collaborate to become the most influential citizen.

To build a new structure, you’ll need to gather construction-materials and fulfil quests first, which in turn will raise your avatar’s experience and his or her Achievement-Level. As a true multiplayer-game you can convince your friends and neighbours to invest in your construction-site, to speed up building. Likewise, competing players can use their resources to delay or stop a completion of a new structure. 

Here’s a sneak-peak on two Coobico-avatars. Members will be able to customize and clothe their characters from head to toe. New fashion will be coming up regularly and can be bought with in-game-currency. Virtual accessoirs in Coobico will follow concurrent fashion-trends closely.

Comparable to a (lightweight) roleplaying-game, avatars are defined by stats. The two most important will be Happiness and Achievement: Achievement records the earned experience and serves as a highscore. Certain activities on Qubus’ island will only be unlocked for a player after reaching a certain achievement-level. Happiness is, well, the avatar’s happiness and current wellbeing, derived from a character’s activities.

Worlds in Motion blogs about Coobico’s development:

“It’ll be isometric 2D, to boot—looks like a lot of companies are realizing that high-powered graphics aren’t always necessary, especially when appealing to a casual audience… they’re not targeting the ‘sweet spot’ tweens-and-teens—rather, Linking People’s gunning for the market pegged as the ‘core’ of casual gaming and the broader market, those aged 30 to 44.”

Update, 01/30/08: Massively points out that we seem to be flinging mud at SL with this posting. Seriously, it’s not our intention to badmouth SL, or anybody else, for that matter. I apologize if the posting appears to be hitting a wrong tone. Our blog contains some completely biased opinions, admittedly—we’re gamers too, and besides reporting on the progress of our product Coobico, we write about things we like or don’t like on the internet from time to time. Even if SL has its own problems, its still a great site.
Lutz Winter



Second Life does not cut a very good figure in the blogosphere currently; take Techcrunch, Kotaku, Intuitive.com or The Onion as examples; they just don’t get a break from making bad headlines about pedophilia, bestiality, illegal gambling, technical bugs, laggy support (especially when it comes to billing-matters) and user-initiated law-suits. Even Time Magazine joins in by declaring SL as one of the five worst websites lately.

Sure, those are all just snapshots, but each of them leave their mark on Second Life’s reputation and their attractiveness towards business-partners. Wired broke news about Second Life’s technical issues and second thoughts of Linden Labs’ sponsoring partners lately:

“Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn’t much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden’s in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex… The Internet will eventually be full of such 3-D environments; Second Life might even be one of them. But in the meantime, it’s just slurping up corporate dollars and delivering little in return.”

Linden Labs will need to work hard on ironing out bugs and developing their product to stay competitive. Especially if you take a glance at previews of PS3’s Home. Probably an unfair comparison to draw, but probably something Linden Labs will need to see to, once Home is out of private beta. Havoc Havok, the engine which Linden Lab has licensed to run SL, will be aquired by Intel shortly, by the way; Intel and Havoc Havok signed a definite agreement as Gamasutra reported yesterday.

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Spieletipps, a large german gaming-portal covers Coobico and its development (in german only):

“Knuddels, Habbo Hotel oder ChatCity - die Auswahl an Chats und virtuellen Welten ist in den vergangenen Jahren enorm gewachsen. Allerdings richten sich die meisten an Jugendliche und junge Erwachsene. Genau diese Marktlücke will das Unternehmen Linking People Ltd. nun schließen. Mit Coobico erscheint Anfang 2008 ein kostenloses Flash-basiertes Multiplayer-Strategiespiel, das besonders Gelegenheitsspieler im Alter von 30 bis 44 ansprechen soll.”

The full article is here.

Developmag, the leading UK trade news and community site for all professionals working in the video games development sector, covers Linking People and Coobico:

“The Hong Kong-based company, established last year by three veteran web designers, is focused on creating Web 2.0 communities and shared gaming experiences aimed at players aged 30 to 44, a demographic which according to a recent study constitutes 79 per cent of the game market.”

Read the full article after the jump.

At the steep northern shore lives one of the island’s oldest inhabitants on his haunted hill: Count Vrykulas. Rarely is the count’s haunted mansion found by visitors – his sporadic guests are challenged to a minigame. Count Vrykulas himself is considered as quite afraid of people, he only shows up at nighttime. Beware, the House on Haunted Hill is one of the places where avatars can get cursed (an in-depth article about curses is here).

Sports- and other minigames can be found in various places on Qubus’ Island by players looking for an extra challenge. Locations like the Haunted Mansion also serve as roleplaying-ish dungeons, which can be explored and looted. 

Admittedly, this piece is already a bit older, but still worth reading: Neil Sorens (Dancing Robot Studios) pins down the problems of most current MMOs in this feature at Gamasutra.
We highly agree, most serious multiplayer-games include too much grinding, challenges take too long, just like group-forming:

The biggest reason is that a large portion of the market is unwilling or unable to dedicate a lot of their time to your game. Former PEG players who have had to quit because of time constraints, uncooperative spouses, jobs, graduation from college, etc., might be willing to play a PEG that provided equal enjoyment for a smaller time commitment. People who game at lunch, on breaks, at the office after work, or even during work could be buying and playing your game if it provided enough enjoyment within their limited time frame. Why should they be wasting their company’s money playing Solitaire when they could be wasting it playing your game?

This pretty much sums up the frustrating premise on which we started designing Coobico’s mechanics: a multiplayer strategy-game, more immersive than a match-3-puzzle, but less time- and money-consuming than your typical hardcore-MMO.

Citybuilding is a central part to Coobico’s gameplay, as its theme is to colonize Qubus’ Island. Players can build different types of buildings and public places like green spaces, comparable to series like SimCity and The Settlers.

Some structures will enable you to trade goods, harvest new resources or just play minigames.
A cityhall is one of more expensive and prolific buildings: while it does not add new essential functions, it has a great impact on the overall wellbeing of the city. At the cityhall players can meet the judge, who will issue new building permits.

Let’s save us the trouble of all too common überhyped marketing-speak, how groundbreakingly Coobico will revolutionize its genre. Let’s just cut to the chase of Coobico’s mixture of game-elements we are going to deliver to your webbrowser:
In Coobico’s online world, you and thousands of other players take on the roles of settlers to a wondrous but run-down and near-abandoned island. By building up your neighbourhood you can compete with other citizens to become the island’s most influential resident.
It’s like a city-builder sim-game, with a twist; you are a tenant of your own city, as well as all fellow townies, with whom you can chat, share or compete.

Customize
It’s a cinch to personalize your avatar’s appearance from head to toe. You can build and customize your own cubicle – your personal space in Coobico. Write your profile and keep up with your friends.

Explore
Dr. Qubus, mad scientist and former owner of Qubus’ Island, left a lot of mysterious machines and ruins after he went missing in a spectacularly failed experiment. You can explore the island to uncover its rare items and the secrets of its ancient ruins. 

Build
Harvest and trade resources to build new structures, streets and green spaces. By maintaining your neighbourhood, you earn experience and influence. Eventually you will even grow rich and influential enough to found your very own city.

So, how much is Coobico going to cost? Nothing. Coobico will be free to play. Our costs will be covered by sponsorships.
Instead of squeezing money out of you for every minor item and activity, we want you to play more. The more your influence on the island grows, the more in-game-money you earn, the more you can customize your avatar and your cubicle.

This is a short sneak-peak into Coobico’s upcoming concept-art. More videos and animations on avatars, non-player-characters and monsters will be coming up under this category.

Essentially being a Flash-based multiplayer-game, Coobico will take place in stunningly mind-boggling… isometric 2D. To put a good face on the matter: it’s a lightweight strategy-game with no retail box to purchase, no cumbersome client software to download and install and no nasty DRM. Just click and you’re in. Maybe you are, just like us, a sucker for stuff like World of Warcraft, but you just don’t have enough time for it. What’s more, we won’t require you to take a summercamp on how to play and navigate around on Qubus’ Island.




Although creating a 2D-game, we don’t want to settle with the regular vector- or pixel-look of most flash-games. We want to achieve a more contemporary look by using pre-rendered 3D-graphics for all backgrounds, buildings and avatars in Coobico. Every object and character is modeled first after numerous concept-sketches, rendered and then processed in Photoshop to be used as an in-game-graphic.
The source of inspiration for our work are mostly mangaesque console-games like Disgaea, Eternal Sonata and anime-titles like Koichi Chigira’s Rasuto Eguzairu (Last Exile).

More concept-sketches, renderings and screenshots are to come in this category soon.

This official developers’ blog will give you the latest and greatest about our new beta-service: Coobico. Coobico is an online-game and a community. It’s a chat and multiplayer, it’s free, it’s flash and browser-based. Think MySims meets Habbo Hotel meets SimCity.

Coobico’s development will be as open and publicly available as possible; we will share early sketches and artwork, animations and game-concepts here. Fresh hands-on about Coobico’s progress will be posted regularly, so make sure to drop by and keep yourself informed where the project is headed.

Best regards,
The Coobico-team.