Monthly Archives: February

A herder drives and herds tamed bossies on a pasture and thus raises food-production for a settlement. A pasture is one of the possible upgrades of a farmstead—other options can be used to produce more wood & crop instead of food.

So some might people might ask how we create textures for Coobico’s 3D-models, and how long it takes to finish a single texture. Since proper lighting and texturing are so important for convincing results in 3D-modeling and -rendering, we take quite some effort to build textures. We took most of our texture library for buildings and natural surfaces through various stages of refinement during our different alpha-versions of the past years, so it’s a bit hard to tell just how long an individual finished texture took to come up with—it’s an ongoing process. Take a look at the two images below to get a better idea of how existing assets were mashed so far.

A nice starting-point for textures is imageafter, where you can download pictures in pretty large resolution. With such basic material we created several wall-textures for buildings and dungeons, etc. for starters, hand-crafted in Photoshop. Then, for our current installment of models, we started to mix wood- and stone-textures for texturing of half-timbered constructions, as well as modeling beams and trusses where necessary. 

At least that’s what John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, claimed at DICE summit, according to Game/Life: “Riccitiello said that while big players like EA will be able to ride out the recession, others will not—which will help to keep ‘junk’ off shelves, he said. ‘A lot of the riff-raff is going to go bankrupt,‘ he said.“

Riccitiello’s statement about the “big players like EA” and the rest, the “riff-raff”, seems to imply that small indie-producers are the omnium-gatherum of crap. I give it to Mr. Riccitiello, that there is a lot mediocrity in the market and that the current financial meltdown is a time of survival of the fittest, more than ever. But I beg to differ on his somewhat high nosed implication: during the past few years most of the innovation in games notably came from small-scale production houses (Braid, Okami, Portal, you name it).

A lot of original ideas might be put on the back-burner until the recovery of the global markets, while big players will be sticking to the tried and true. It’s sad to see a company loosing touch with its very own roots. Riccitiello would be well suited to remember the early eighties, when EA was still a small start-up going by the name of Amazin’ Software.

Soure: Wired’s Game/Life

A minstrel works at a playhouse to provide entertainment for villagers and thus raises both community and folklore of a settlement.

At Gamasutra, game lawyers S. Gregory Boyd and Vejay G. Lalla talk about business considerations for in-game advertising:
“Advertising in games is currently in a stage similar to internet advertising in the late 1990’s— the research and development phase. As such, many deal terms during negotiations between game companies and advertisers—including one of the most important to all parties, price—are in flux.“

Here come’s another upgrade of a tavern. A playhouse accommodates a minstrel (read more here) who provides entertainment for villagers. Thus, a settlements community and folklore are raised.

There has been an interesting meme recently on how to fix the broken parts of most contemporary MMOs (grinding, accessibility, unfinished and buggy features, you name it).

First, Fidgit’s renowned Tom Chick covered his top five reasons why MMOs are broken with a roundhouse kick ranging from subscriptions fees to too static worlds, to problems with grouping. Answering Chick, Scott Jennings rebutted at Broken Toys that Chick generalizes problems which are mostly specific to WoW: “Tom Chick’s core problem: MMO = World of Warcraft… And you know, when one of the most influential game writers in the industry makes this mistake, and essentially writes a piece on “Why is World of Warcraft Like World of Warcraft?”, I think we have a problem bigger then aggro management.“
Trembling Hand’s Tim Dean then in reply suggested his top ten on how to fix the given situation, which lead Scott Jennings weighing in again on Tim’s article.

Given the long industry experience of the three parties, it’s a conversation really worth reading, don’t miss it.

Starting with this piece, we will post about building-upgrades every now and then. We introduced you to the concept of building-blocks and -upgrades recently, read more about it here.
Let’s start off with upgrades you can enhance a tavern with. Typically, a tavern is used to generate community, one of the key-characteristics of a settlement. If the general level of community is high enough, and a settlement instead needs additional food-supplies, you can opt to upgrade a tavern with a cookshop. A cook running a cookshop needs community as a prerequisite and produces food.