Monthly Archives: March

Cursed & Co were mentioned for a few times already, it’s high time to show some of Coobico’s adversaries. Let’s start with Steambots. These half-sentient, half-moronic contraptions were build by Dr. Qubus’ as his first attempt of creating robotic assistants, but eventually discontinued due to their obvious deficiencies in favour of the Q-Bots. Mark 1 Steambots are not inherently evil, but bad-tempered, ignorant and quite the opposite of a helpful servant. They tend to attack everybody standing in the way of their pointless duties. Unfortunately, their rugged design provides them with a seeemingly endless life expectancy. Steambots are therefor met all over Qubus’ Island, especially in dungeons.

Mabinogi 마비노기, South Korean MMORPG released by Nexon is going to open to the public tomorrow, as scheduled. The official US-website has a notice about a “huge patch” available as of today, which will launch Generation 1 Season 1 of the game (Mabinogi’s term for its patches). The client itself comes at a hefty 890 MBs and can be downloaded here. While the game itself is free, Nexon offers premium items and skills to boost your character. Also, players who wish to participate in the game’s storyline must select from one of three exclusive monthly services. Gametrailers has a few videos, check them out here. 

The game probably keeps the record of hacked virtual goods with a Japanese teenager stealing 36 million yen (US$ 325,000) worth of game-points, sparking a discussions about online games’ billing-systems. 

Upon request, here is a more detailed description of how Coobico’s isometric graphics are being produced – most work on the imagery is done by Stefan and me (Lutz) and starts with collecting mood-material. Personally, I find myself greatly inspired by steampunk-anime like ラストエグザイル Last Exile (outstandingly detailed vehicle-designs and a quite dark setting), Otomo’s スチームボーイ Steamboy, as well as the works of Hayao Miazaki. Films and literature serve as inspiration too, like Metropolis, french Vidoq or writings of Lewis Carroll.

Pencil-Scribbles are then made according to the mood-material to capture the general steampunkish setting of Coobico. Creating a MMO takes quite some time, so it does not come as a surprise that these conceptual designs were already finished about a year ago.





Afterwards, realisation in 3D is being done directly, without delving deeper into details and color-schemes. Such production step would be preferable but can’t easily be accomplished by a small development-team under high time-pressure. Fortunately, with a small team, communicating the creative vision is comparably easy. Modeling, texturing and rendering of finished models is pretty straightforward and can be achieved with every available 3D-solution – we do not need to keep a big bag of tricks here (like low-poly-modeling and so on), as all graphics are pre-rendered. Four images are rendered for each building for example: a view from the left and right, as players are able to choose the facing of a building when it comes into play; and two different levels for most structures (except for unique sites like the Shattered Temple or the Haunted Mansion). These rendered high-definition images are already nearly the final draft. They are then retouched by Stefan in Photoshop. 





During the final overhaul, details are added and shadows and any rough edges fixed. The final images are then resized to fit the scale of Coobico’s maps and get documented in our tile-catalogue. Whatsmore, Stefan acts as Coobico’s leveldesigner too, and implements finished graphics into the game’s maps with our leveleditor.
Any further questions or remarks? Please just drop us your comments.

Now this really too cool, albeit not connected to gaming in itself; today we were excited to learn that Google finally offers an API to its language-tools – it was about time. A certain kind of translation to Coobico’s chat-interface was planned all along, and after pondering for quite a while on the actual realization, we decided to use some kind of automated approach, translating chat-bubbles among players with different language-settings on the fly. There were quite a few free, open-source, unofficial solutions available during the past years which could be queried against Google’s translation page or Yahoo’s Babelfish (and of course the occasional premium services). Now, such hackerish approaches tend to break too easy, so it’s a relief to see Google’s translation APIs finally going live, featuring all languages of Coobico’s prime markets: English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese. While it is not sure yet if such auto-translations will already be a part of the closed beta, they will definitely be added further down the road.
Enough development-chitchat, back to work!

Today EA opened the doors to its official new Sims 3 website with a few screenshots (the above video depicts reputed screenies of the game) and some marketing-chit-chat. According to Gamespot, EA’s CFO Warren Jenson announced the franchise’s 3rd part as “a fiscal ‘09 title… , meaning the game would hit stores before April 2009.”

A few highlights of Sims 3, as reported by Wayfarerwings.com will be: “Less micromanagement of your Sim — there will only be 3 attribute bars to keep up with rather than the 8 we have now… More focus on developing the neighborhood as a whole… More personality customization...” and “Opportunities — somewhat like mini-quests that you can choose to undertake with your Sim (think MMORPG style)”. Another addition will be – more ads, as Gamespot has it: “While EA will enter into agreements with advertisers for The Sims, Seabolt said the publisher is very choosy about how it goes about that and is careful to make sure it’s something players will welcome. For example, he mentioned a promotion that saw Sims players receive an in-game Ford Mustang. While Ford did pay EA for the product placement, Seabolt said many users looked at the car simply as a cool gift for their Sims to drive, not an ad.”

While Steve Seabolt, EA’s vice president for global brand development of The Sims label, is probably right that ads can add realism and flavor to a virtual world, one has to wonder if players who already payed for a title still want to be pestered with advertising. Even without such added revenue-streams, the Sims continues to be a cash-cow for EA, with the 100 millionth unit about to be sold this month. 

Recently, the announcement of Linden Labs’ CEO Philip Rosedale that “the company he founded has begun a search for a new CEO with more operational and management expertise” was followed by quite some mixed comments ranging from “With Rosedale in a more ancillary visionary role, and a more experienced day-to-day, managerial CEO in place, that’s likely to change things, surely for the better.” (James Wagner Au, GigaOm) to “while Linden Lab insists that the decision wasn’t precipitated by a crisis, it’s hard to ignore the ongoing backlash against Second Life from the mainstream media.” (Prokofy Neva, Virtual Worlds News) to “Rosedale’s resignation from his executive position more firmly solidifies my own perception that it is only a matter of when, not if, the land of bizarre, free-form make-believe takes its final bow.” (Paul Glazowksi, Mashable)

Now, is writing off SL not a bit premature? After all, (according to Techcrunch) Linden Labs has a funding of around US$ 19 million under its belts (which, BTW, wouldn’t keep Gaia Online even running for more than 9 months, as we learned in the recent days). But Linden also faces peculiar problems both from its inside (namely the complexity of its product and its company-structure) and from the outside with growing competition like Hipihi, EA-Land and Multiverse.

SL has to confront a vital question which eventually every social network/massive world these days will have to answer: What is its purpose and unique benefit to its members, after the initial sensation has worn off? 

Alright, all blogs on socnets talk about Bebo and AOL today, but we would like to go on with more examples from our Coobico-production-pipeline here: in part one, we presented examples of floor-tiles, and as a follow-up we gathered a few elements which you’ll encounter especially indoors and in in dungeons. 

Cyworld 싸이월드 is a South Korean-born social network, sometimes coined as “Habbo Hotel meets blogging”, which is extremely popular in South Korea with 20 million visitors per month. After reaching a market-share of 90%, Cyworld naturally expanded to several other asian countries, the US and Europe (spearheaded by Germany) in the recent two years.

SK Communications (owner of Cyworld) teamed up with German telco Deutsche Telekom (to be more specific: T-Venture, the company’s corporate venture arm) in 2006 to form Cyworld Europe GmbH. A natural fit, as Cyworld is also heavily in mobile services. SK invested a reputed 3.5 million Euro for a 50.2 percent share, whereas T-Venture paid 25.000 Euro into the joint-venture, according to Edgar-Online. Cyworld Europe was to enter the european market by starting with a local German version.

A few days ago, SK Communications announced to pull out of Europe effectively as reported by Korea Times, closing down Cyworld.de on March 15th, after being out of closed beta for only 5 months.
What happened to Cyworld in Germany? Says Park Sang-joon, chief executive of the firm: “It was difficult to overcome the cultural barrier in Germany where local firms began similar services and the operation costs were high… The restructuring of global operations is to minimize losses from capital investment by liquidating low-profit subsidiaries… (Instead) we will increase investment in markets where there is high profit and high potential.”

While it was not disclosed how much of the investment was already spent, both venture-partners seem to have lost their nerves over the sustainability and profitability of the German market. Admittedly, blogging is still underdeveloped in Germany when measured internationally: the comparably small market of social networking and blogging is shared by a few large networks like StudiVZ, SchülerVZ, Xing and Lokalisten. Cyworld.de seemingly could not generate enough attention with and traffic from its target-group. Marketing campaigns like “White galleries”, a Cyworld-supported graffiti-event in major German areas of high population density were nice, creative ideas, but ultimately lacked in reach and result. Hell, even when comparing the daily traffic of this humble blog with Cyworld, Coobico.com surpassed Cyworld.de’s amount of visitors on a few occasions according to Alexa. Now, Alexa needs to be taken with a pinch of salt for sure, but a wild guessing would be that Cyworld.de’s reach didn’t surpassed a few hundred visitors per day at best. As Cyworld’s spokeswoman She Hee-jung put it: “the German language site, which was launched only four months ago, has seen few members signing up so there is no need to worry about users’ protests at the closure.”

Still, it seems to be a rushed decision to pull a product after only 5 months; a reasonable reaction would have been to cut costs first. However, one issure remains: what happens to the owners of former purchased goods? A Cyworld Acorn (Cyworld’s currency) came at about 2 Euro-Cent. If any former Cyworld-member happens to read this blog, you are kindly invited to leave a comment. Your opinions (or any announcments you received from Cyworld.de) are welcome.

Work keeps piling up, that’s for sure, but here is at least a quick and short sneak peak into some graphics we use as Coobico’s terrain. As a classic 2.5D-game, the world of Qubus’ Island is made of tiles, put next to each other neatly to form a seamless map. Each of the several hundreds of tiles is modeled in 3D and then graphically retouched to achieve its final looks.

More examples to come in the next part, stay tuned…

Consulting company Entertainment Media Research recently teamed up with law firm Wiggin to do an in-depth audit of entertainment and digital activity in the UK, which reveals surprising preferences, as most respondents hold reading books and watching the tube most dear. The full report has a hefty 249 pages, but it’s worth reading. To put it as a haiku:

HDTV and books rule
Prefer simple games than complex
Everything’s pricy.

The report can be downloaded here (PDF, 8.5MB).
via Virtual Worlds News.

Another type of spooky location which might affect the overall wellbeing of settlements if appearing close-by are graveyards. Settlers keep telling stories about grizzly sightings near such cemeteries – don’t forget to bring armament if you like to visit them.
To counter loss of wellbeing due to graveyards, a scholar can be settled nearby. Scholars also offer protection against certain types of events and are generally a good resource when looking for in-depth information about certain places or species of Qubus’ Island. 

Livejournal hosts two articles on how you to superimpose traditional MMORPG-roles on small business-units as a way of managing your office-team:

“You have the following roles: Main Tank: That person on the team who’s always out front, and who’s face is synonymous with the team. Often times this is the Manager themselves, but sometimes this is a member of the group who interacts with customers/other departments. Main Healer: The motivator of the group. They’re good at keeping people’s spirits up, keeping them engaged, and keeping them coming in day in and day out. DPS: The rest of the team helps to get the projects complete and the work done.”

Sweet. The follow-up to the first article is here.