Monthly Archives: December

The year is nearly over and it’s time to show our gratitude to everybody following our work so faithfully; thanks, especially for all the encouraging comments and emails. As this years small Christmas-goodie we’ve been hurrying up to finish one of the mini-games to be included in Coobico: Metes & Bounds is a clever little tile-laying game, where players expand the borders of their territories turn by turn to claim the largest lands for their fiefdom. Its still got a few loose ends which are going to be added soon, but we challenge you to find your personal highscore in solitaire-mode or by playing against the computer. If you like the game, please make sure to bookmark it and help us to spread the word. Metes & Bounds will also make its appearance on Facebook, we will keep you posted here.

Development of Coobico is still in full swing, throughout Christmas-time and the coming week, too; blogging will be a bit light though until New Year. Again, thanks and merry Christmas.

Thanks to our readers, this humble developer’s blog has crossed the mark of half a million page-hits these days. Thanks, everybody.

Gaia Online lays off 36 employees despite alleged record earnings, as heard throughout several blogs; 16 full time staff members and 20 contractors were released. The company raised US$11 million back in July (lead by Institutional Venture Partners) and has allegedly been looking for new team-members up until a month ago.

A propensity to save comes as no surprise during the current economic downturn (or using the crisis as a welcome alibi to iron out a flawed hiring policy). Techcrunch’s Jason Kincaid mentions a rumor though that the layoffs are connected to a product launch which “didn’t go as well as hoped”. That’s a bit curious—the last launch was Gaia’s new MMO zOMG, which supposedly had a very good start with around half a million sign ups. Probably Gaia had hoped (especially through zOMG) for an even higher turnover for their virtual goods?

Pew Internet & American Life Project offers yet another interesting study, meaningful not only to an American audience: the report “Adults and Video Games” claims that more “than half - 53% - of all American adults play video games of some kind, whether on a computer, on a gaming console, on a cell phone or other handheld device, on a portable gaming device, or online.“ Among adults aged 65+, still “nearly a third play games everyday, a significantly larger percentage than all younger players, of whom about 20% play everyday.“

It’s always amazing to see the games industry—and especially the field of virtual worlds—consistently ignoring such a large target group by focusing on kids and teenagers.

Upgrading the world of Coobico to 3D essentially led us to create 3D-avatars for Coobico as well (the process ist still not finished yet). This applies to the process of creating avatars and viewing their profiles only, though. Even though opting for an extreme low-poly approach (check out the screenshot above of the current alpha-version of a default avatar), the actual game still needs to resort to isometric sprites for displaying avatars—unfortunately, Flash is still just not fast enough to process raw amounts of polygons. 

I spend a few extra hours lately to build a virtual board-game which is going to be integrated into Coobico as one of our mini-games. Check out the screenshots below, the gameplay is quite easy and shares some similarities with Carcassonne. It is played in 3D, running partially on our Coobico engine.

Now, some might ask “why bother about mini-games instead of concentrating on finishing the core of the main game?“ Well, since the completion of Coobico still takes more time, we just decided to release as much of our already finished work as possible. 

We will publish the mini-game on Facebook too, hopefully raising more awareness for Coobico in the coming weeks and months. The minigame still needs some heavy playtesting, but we are going to launch it in the next few weeks, so please stay tuned…