Monthly Archives: October

Parks and green spaces act as a vital counterbalance to the industrial estates in a neighbourhood. They raise the land-value and the district’s wellbeing. The park has trees and gras and a pond with actual fish in it. Players can meet the gardener at the park, who’s always eager to trade crop.

Companies currently monetize their MMOs and chats either through monthly subscription fees, offering virtual goods or a mixture of both.
Now, we don’t want to rain on everybody else’s parade – companies need to earn their fair share; but price structures for most services and goods seem to be out of all proportions to their avail or the service rendered. Just changing your name at imvu.com will debit your account with around $7 for example. Habbo Hotel charges a monthly fee of $6 or so for its Habbo Club (enabling more exclusive content). Their Furnis are more affordable, as long as it’s not a rare item (prices for rares can be in the ballpark of $5 again).
Lending yourself a real name in Second Life comes at a hefty $100, plus an annual fee of $50. For a Second Life premium account you need to pay around 10 bucks, enabling landownership. But building up a bigger share of land can easily amount to several thousands of dollars.

Worlds in Motion has a very interesting piece on how much stuff you can buy at Habbo Hotel with 10 bucks. Read it here.

Relying on sponsorships and in-game advertisement, Coobico will essentially offer every goodie and minigame for free. Users pay with ingame-money which can be earned by successfully finished quests. ‘Course, Coobico will enable players to buy ingame-money, too. But we’d like to stress that no member will be pushed to pay for any inventory-item. 

Qubus’ Island will feature its own – quite mediterranean – weather conditions. Tracking the weather will be important for players who would like to successfully grow a nice front garden for their cubicle. That said, you will not need a green thumb to keep your garden in good shape, but you will want to keep an eye on the weather-report form time to time. Check out our set of weather-icons.

In various locations on Qubus’ Island, players will discover strange, ancient places like the Shattered Tower. Seemingly eons old but not quite referable to any prehistoric culture. These places usually swarm with oddish, dangerous creatures, and avatars can even be turned into monsters themselves by a curse there.
These dungeons also keep a lot of valuable loot for players who prefer rolepaying-ish treasure-hunt-quests to city-building. For places like the Shattered Tower, Coobico includes a simple combat system.

Qubus’ Island is hardly found on any nautical chart. It is shrouded in legends about lost mariners and merchants, missing in the island’s uncharted waters, or seized by its nameless monstrous inhabitants. Only a few pilots and seafarers, familiar with the island, describe it as a weathered, almost cube-shaped formation. Close to the rectangular rock, allegedly all compasses and controls are going crazy.





The island was named after the illustrious Dr. Qubus, who set out to fathom its secrets. The ingenious scientist’s prior discoveries included major findings on why woodpeckers don’t get headaches, for example. Qubus also had studied the alteration of brainwaves while consuming Cheddar-cheese, proclaimed one of the most significant researches of the decade by the Luxuriant Flowing Beards Club.
Accompanied by his assistant Erasmus and his butler Albert, Dr. Qubus found the island after following the footsteps of his missing colleague Professor Lina Rotwang. Qubus discovered some startling clues when he found and contuined Rotwangs abandoned research on the island.

More on Qubus’ Island and Dr. Qubus’ disappearance in a spectacularly failed experiment to follow in part two…

Today, Mashable, probably teh world’s largest blog on social networks, features Coobico’s development:

“Although every MMO is, in fact, some sort of social network, many companies are trying to find that special niche where gaming and social networking meet. Coobico is, as the founders say, a mix of casual MMO (casual, in the realm of MMOs, usually means that you don’t have to leave your family, quit your job and spend the rest of your wretched life living in a tiny apartment, permanently hooked to the screen, to be successful in the game) and a social network. It’s Flash based, it’s free, it’s part strategy, part RPG, and it’s coming out in the first quarter of 2008.”

Read the full article after the jump.

After part one, here are some of the more shady characters to be found on Qubus’ Island.

Morten, the beggar
Shady Morten lurks around at the city plaza. It is gossiped that Morten is a spy for a sinister secret society residing on Qubus’ Island. Some people seem to call him by the nickname 78 (probably a reference to his IQ).

Locus Robur
Locus lives in a smallish harbour-shanty at the southern shores, running a kind of honky-tonk joint. His past is apparently intertwined with organized crime, and he still is sometimes accused of being the head of a band of skypirates, using Qubus’ Island as their hideout. At Robur’s Den-of-Thieves, players are always welcome to play a quick hand of cards or pick up one of his devious quests.

Hekate, the hag
Somewhere in Foggy Forest, Hekate’s witches’ house can be found. Strangely, it appears to be much larger inside than its outside could possibly contain. In her alchemist’s shop Hekate trades with useful adventurers’ gear, but her house is essentially one of the places where players can catch a curse.

During the game you will inevitable come to a point of growing bored with playing your townie, getting some appetite for destruction of your opponents’ neighbourhood. Don’t worry, there is a game-mechanism in place for this: Curses. A curse is basically a quest turning you into a fiend for a short time of sheer rampage and monster madness. Go ahead and tear down buildings as you see fit, your competitors will probably do the same to your neighbourhood if they get cursed once in a while.
Curses come in different shapes; besides being turned into monster, you may also receive a request to build a new hazard-spot, like a Den-of-Thieves, or an entrance to a subterranean dungeon. Such places will have a negative impact on their surrounding neighbourhood.

Curse-quests can eventually be found in eerie places like the House on Haunted Hill or the Foggy Forest. A curse gets broken automatically after a while or after being busted as a monster.