Monthly Archives: April

Sony has lifted its NDA for the new, kid-friendly MMORPG Free Realms lately, which Tobold took as an opportunity to cover Free Realms in a few postings. It’s interesting to get a balanced review of a casual multiplayer-title from an avid MMO-gamer like Tobold and well worth reading:

“Free Realms is a great game, even if it is still in beta and not quite ready for release. I’ll probably buy a couple of months subscription, and splurge some money on trading cards and other microtransactions. But this will probably not last all that long. Free Realms is no “WoW Killer”, because it doesn’t have that long-term motivation of making your character all-powerful. I do however think that Free Realms will easily get millions of players, even if many of them will just play the free part.“

This is our model of a mason’s lodge, which is yet another upgrade for workshops (but only available after you upgraded your workshop to a guildhall). A mason works at such a lodge to produce prefabs, an important resource for building various advanced structures. Masons require miscellaneous goods to be kept happy, especially rocks and tools.

So, how is Coobico’s current progress, Chris asked in a recent comment. This question touches on a similar topic raised by Femur, who wanted to know how the global financial crisis has impacted our development so far. 

The two biggest influences on our project-schedule can easily be pinpointed as switching our engine to 3D and the tweaking of high-level game-concepts.

Going 3D a year ago took its toll since we needed to practically throw our whole front-end and part of our back-end out of the window and start from scratch at that moment. Seeing how Flash-3D is growing by the leaps and bounds, I still find it was a good decision to do so.

Tweaking our concept had the biggest impact on the whole game so far. When we started developing Coobico in 2006, most concepts of mixing Social Worlds, Casual Gaming and MMOs were rather new and there were no best practices available—we were putting a lot of thought into how to achieve the best mix of all three worlds while keeping a close eye on the progress of the industry itself. Obviously, it’s hard to put that into a schedule (‘innovating concepts, 90 days, check’).

We are developing in a much more Scrum-like fashion now (feels very natural for a small team, since a lot of sudden issue land on the critical path of one and the same team-member anyway), and we have a short-list of milestones which need to be finished in the next months. In our current sprint we are producing a demo to showcase Coobico to interested business-parties. Once the demo is finished, a whole new bunch of screenshots and videos of the current alpha-version will be released here, so stay tuned please.

This year’s GDC featured an interesting panel about Reneé Mauborgne’s and Chan Kim’s Red/Blue Ocean strategy and its impact on MMOs and the game-industry. Though not without critical reception, the strategy describes the gaming market—especially the one of multiplayer games—pretty neatly. As panelist Sebastien de Halleux, founder of Playfish Games, is hitting the nail on the head: the whole industry is a very example of a red ocean market.
Subscription-based, grind-depending MMORPGs do not co-exist easily. Triple-A studios and -publishers rival each other in throwing more money into the ring to build the next WoW-killer (very red ocean, isn’t it?), featuring better graphics and more of the tried-and-true concepts and requiring more hardware.

When reading Adam Martin’s thoughts about this at T-Machine, it struck me how much Coobico’s business-concept shares with the Blue Ocean Strategy, without really planning it out in the first place:

Instead of trying to be the “next killer of X or Y”, we were pursuing a strategy to find a new audience and new opportunities to play—I have personally pointed that out in an interview with Worlds in Motion. A basic key decision was to stick with Flash, for example, which enables playing Coobico on a machine where you are not allowed to install software or just plainly on the good ole’ travel-notebook.

Offering playing modes which don’t require you to skip playing WoW or Warhammer.

Cutting costs and innovation:  compared to AAA blockbuster game studios, we are working with a ridiculously small development team and budget, which helps us to take larger risks when innovating features. As a small studio you can’t play the finanical red ocean game anyway.

Here’s our model of a stone quarry—where a stone-cutter extracts rocks from a deep mine, thus raising the feed of both rocks and waste. Just like ore pits, stone-quarries are an upgrade for workshops and guildhalls.

An ore-pit is the working place of a miner, where ore is prospected for the related settlement. The steady mining of ore comes at the price of increased levels of waste though. Ore is of particular importance to keep advanced settlers like blacksmiths happy (a blacksmith uses ore to produce tools & weapons).
Ore pits are upgrades for workshops and guildhalls. More possible upgrades like stone quarries and masons’ lodges are coming soon.