Monthly Archives: February

Hive-like lairs emerge all around on Qubus’ Island every once a while. Such hazard-spots are prone to curses, form trail-heads for wandering critters and ultimately take their toll on a settlement’s wellbeing when appearing close by. As a counter-measure to avoid loss of wellbeing, a monster-hunter can be settled at the settlement. At a monster-hunter’s useful adventurer’s gear is on display, too. 

Qubus’ Island is peppered with eerie places like forlorn ruins, villains’ dens and even quite alien dwellings, breeding with dangerous creatures. Some of them offer opportunities for dungeon-exploring or mini-games, while all of them have a negative impact on surrounding settlements by lowering the score of general wellbeing. For each hazard-spot in Coobico there will be a counter-structure though, which players can build to avoid deductions. 

The above depicted hive-like structure is one of the strangest sights on Qubus’ Island. Its shape resembles the Shattered Tower. They seem to have the same otherworldly origin. Players will eventually be able to find out more about these sites and their stories by gathering clues throughout Qubus’ Island.

There was a quite lively debate on revenue-models of games in the past weeks: what is going to be the gaming industries’ dominant model – retail, microtransactions, subscriptions, free to play? Could high-budget titles like WoW sustain themselves on microtransactions?

Here comes another smack to subscription-based games: Steven Davis, CEO of SecurePlay, points towards a current rise of credit-card-fraud, connected with MMOs and gold-farming (or rather gold-fraud), this time hitting the game-industry rather than gamers:

“Of course, why steal accounts and do all of that hacking? After all, credit cards numbers are widely available at nominal cost. ...
Banks don’t like charge-backs. High risk/ high fraud markets (the adult industry and gambling) pay a substantial premium for payment processing. If fraud gets too bad, payment processors will simply refuse to service companies. The also will impose additional procedures to combat fraud - all of which cost money. ...
So, gold farming may go away or the price of items on secondary markets may explode as gold farmers have to manage their own fraud risks from gold frauders.”

Not only could this in turn raise the prices for subscription-based games like WoW, as payment processors will charge premiums to the gaming-industry if they start to consider them as a high risk/high fraud market (or by increased costs for countermeasures being passed to the customers) – banks will probably just block payments to game-operators altogether due to rise of charge-backs, as already happening with Halifax of Bank of Scotland.

via Kotaku.

All of the images shown here at the Coobico dev-blog show a work in progress, things will keep changing as we are retouching gameplay-features and game-graphics, to get everything as smooth and polished as possible. Currently we have revisited our Count Vrykulas, and he is back with 66 percent more evilness.
The character seemed to need that nudge after putting more details into the design of his habitat, the Haunted Mansion. The old model will stay in the drawer and probably be recycled somewhere else. 

The next iteration of Sim City on Nintendo’s DS has been herolded with a japanese trailer a few days ago, the release-date is set to March, according to Gamespot. The first DS Sim City worked like a charm when played with a stylus, it was a very decent port.
Sim City 2 seems to not have changed a lot graphic-wise, but rather comes with a completely different take on its well-known city-building concept: according to Kotaku, game-play will revolve around building cities in different civilizations, which could turn SC2 into a lovechild of Civ and Sim City.

BTW: Civilization will come to the DS, too. Check out this article and a few screenshots after the jump.

The Worlds In Motion Summit, part of GDC in San Francisco, which closed its doors yesterday, brought a lot of valuable insights on massive worlds and their convergence with MMO’s. Worlds in Motion has covered a lot of them, but one article on Adrian Crook, senior producer at Relic Entertainment / THQ Canada, and his talks about “Free to Play” appealed to us in particular:

“Adrian Crook opened his talk on free-to-play with a look at the larger trends surrounding the business model in the real world. In Vancouver, ad revenues are used to offset the costs of public toilets. Musical artists like Radiohead are using the “name your own price model” and finding success. And European discount airlines like RyanAir utilize the free revenue model by charging for cargo and incidentals, and by negotiating reduced landing fees at airports. ... “With free to play, it’s all about monetizing attention,” Crook pointed out. Among the worlds with the highest userbases, only WoW charges subscriptions. 91 percent of the online PC gaming that kids under 18 do is of the free to play variety, noted Crook, citing NPD stats.”

To allow “users to purchase stuff via in-games efforts alone—in other words, an attention-based currency—and a real money-based system for the ‘cash rich, time poor.’” is exactly Coobico’s revenue-model, we couldn’t agree more, Adrian.

Some quests may not be available for pick-up, until you meet certain requirements for the quest. Such Prerequisites can come in different shapes: a few of Coobico’s dungeons for example will not be accessible by merely walking there; they can only be reached by accepting a respective treasure-hunting quest, which in turn requires you to have some kind of ancient treasure-map.



As for city-building (which is also a quest, remember), a few prerequisites exist as well, namely the brickyard (to the right) and the blacksmith (to the left). The brickyard will enable building any structure besides the initial city-hall. Later on, before you can upgrade a village’s buildings to their second level, a blacksmith is needed.

We tossed in these two structures to avoid having to keep some kind of “tech-level” for settlements and tying this game-mechanism into our already existing quest-system. Coobico puts its focus more on personal actions rather than micro-management.

An interview with Reflexive’s head of marketing, Russell Caroll, on piracy of casual games was recently published on Gamasutra: “92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn’t go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%.”

Russell then elaborates on countermeasures, especially DRM: “in many cases improving the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system to be more secure can be more effective as it renders a large number of those links obsolete. This is tricky to be sure, because improving the security must be done without making the DRM so onerous that it keeps honest customers from purchasing games.”

We are designers too, so we know it sucks if your intellectual property is ripped off. But that argument seems to pretty much heading down the same road like the music-industries’ musings. Serious, how about changing your business-model?

The Shattered Temple, found close to the Shattered Tower in the rough and ragged island’s south-west, is yet another entrance to Coobico’s diverse subterranean dungeons. The temple appears to be a few hundred years old, but was seemingly abandoned a long time ago according to its condition of deterioration. The original purpose of the site has yet to be discovered.

As you probably noticed by now, Coobico is going to be a completely free-to-play game, relying on advertisement-revenues. According to a report from GigaOm about the Casual Connect Conference in Amsterdam, this business-model is going to pan out pretty well:

“The vast majority of people — 90 percent, to be precise — will watch ads if it means they get to play games for free, according to a report presented by RealNetworks at the Casual Connect conference in Amsterdam… Perhaps even more relevant, however, is RealNetworks’ corollary claim: Of those ad watchers surveyed, 34 percent reported clicking through or taking other actions to learn more about the advertised product.”

Read the full article after the jump.

There are banks in Coobico, alright, but these will not enable transferals of money between players, like in other massive worlds. In Coobico they have a different function:
First of all, settlers who add a bank to their village will raise the productivity and land-value of their settlements. And, secondly, players can deposit their surplus of money and resources at a bank. Valuables are kept safe at the bank, that is, until the bank is destroyed – then all belongings are automatically transferred back to their owners. Deposits will even earn a slight interest, if the according settlement’s land-value is higher at the time of the withdrawal than at the time of investment.

The first structure of a new village is always the cityhall. Its construction-plan is obtained after picking up a settlers’ quest. Place the cityhall as the center of the new settlement in your most favorite place – maybe you like to settle down somewhere near other villages to take advantage of their infrastructure; or maybe you want to claim your piece of land in a remote place.

The cityhall enables settlers to add more structures to their village. Each structure is build in a similar pattern: pick up an according quest, place the building, then pay for its costs. 

A village has a score recorded in Coobico’s leaderboards: its land-value. With each new building, a village’s land-value is increased. This boosts the owner’s highscore, but also raises the price of constructing further structures.
Other important city-stats are Wellbeing and Productivity. Wellbeing indicates the quality of living; it’s influenced by a lot of factors like the amount of industrial estates, the level of greening and the quantity of hazard-spots close to the settlement.
Finally, a village’s productivity adds up all its economic activities from trading goods at a merchant to harvesting resources – even if bargains in a village are made by non-residents. 

Settlers will need to increase their village’s land-value as good as possible whilst balancing their productivity and wellbeing, and, of course, keeping all of their structures in good repair. 

We recently came across this video about alpha-gameplay taken from Wakfu (which is already a bit older, admittedly). Wakfu is a partially free anime-styled MMORPG from Ankama, the french developer of the well-renowed Dofus. Good work, Ankama, the video looks very promising. Check the original video at dailymotion.